(June 19, 2015) Facing charges related to the June 2014 death of Gioni Phillips, Gemayel Jarmon, 32, of Berlin, pleaded guilty to second-degree murder last week in Worcester County Circuit Count and was sentenced to serve 10 years.
Probation conditions had not been updated in the Maryland Judiciary’s case search website, but the court ordered he must serve at least half of the sentence, because the incident is classified as a “crime of violence.”
Charges were filed, and subsequently not prosecuted by then-State’s Attorney Joel Todd. The incident occurred in 2007, when Phillips was 3 months old, and the cause of his injuries were attributed to “shaken baby syndrome.”
Phillips survived the 2007 incident, only to die last year, when the case was reopened by State’s Attorney Beau Oglesby and Jarmon was prosecuted.
Jarmon, in a handwritten response to the charges filed two months after the incident, explained his behavior as shaking the infant to rouse him after an earlier head injury, admittedly caused by Jarmon, left the child unresponsive.
