Law&Crime Sidebar - California Mom Poisoned Young Daughter and Watched Her Die

Episode Date: September 13, 2024

Macie Silvey, 22, was sentenced to spend decades behind bars after she was convicted of her own child’s cruel murder in Shasta County, California. Despite conflicting stories on how 2-year-old Rylee ingested multiple prescription pills, the the jury agreed that Silvey intentionally allowed her daughter to overdose. Law&Crime’s Jesse Weber digs deeper into the case with licensed clinical social worker and trauma expert Shari Botwin.PLEASE SUPPORT THE SHOW: Get 50% off of confidential background reports at https://www.truthfinder.com/lcsidebarHOST:Jesse Weber: https://twitter.com/jessecordweberLAW&CRIME SIDEBAR PRODUCTION:YouTube Management - Bobby SzokeVideo Editing - Michael Deininger and Christina FalconeScript Writing & Producing - Savannah WilliamsonGuest Booking - Alyssa Fisher & Diane KayeSocial Media Management - Vanessa BeinSTAY UP-TO-DATE WITH THE LAW&CRIME NETWORK:Watch Law&Crime Network on YouTubeTV: https://bit.ly/3td2e3yWhere To Watch Law&Crime Network: https://bit.ly/3akxLK5Sign Up For Law&Crime's Daily Newsletter: https://bit.ly/LawandCrimeNewsletterRead Fascinating Articles From Law&Crime Network: https://bit.ly/3td2IqoLAW&CRIME NETWORK SOCIAL MEDIA:Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lawandcrime/Twitter: https://twitter.com/LawCrimeNetworkFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/lawandcrimeTwitch: https://www.twitch.tv/lawandcrimenetworkTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@lawandcrimeSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wonderly Plus subscribers can binge all episodes of this Law and Crimes series ad-free right now. Join Wonderly Plus in the Wondery app Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Agent Nate Russo returns in Oracle 3, Murder at the Grandview, the latest installment of the gripping Audible Original series. When a reunion at an abandoned island hotel turns deadly, Russo must untangle accident from murder. But beware, something sinister lurks in the grand. View Shadows. Joshua Jackson delivers a bone-chilling performance in this supernatural thriller that

will keep you on the edge of your seat. Don't let your fears take hold of you as you dive into this addictive series. Love thrillers with a paranormal twist? The entire Oracle trilogy is available on Audible. Listen now on Audible. I am beautiful. I'm smart. I am courageous. I'll tell yes. The mother of a two-year-old girl is going to prison after she pleaded guilty. to poisoning the toddler with prescription drugs and watching her die. We're going to have on a trauma expert and licensed social worker to talk about this. Welcome to Sidebar, presented by Law and Crime. Jesse Weber.

Prosecutors in California say Macy Sylvie was just 21 years old when she gave her two-year-old daughter, Riley, multiple prescription pills, and watched her suffer inside of a car before she died. Now, Sylvie ended up pleading guilty. Charges of murder in the first degree, kidnapping. This was back in May. And now she has been sentenced. Sentenced to 33 years to life in prison. By the way, when we put Sylvie's name into the search box on TruthFinder, we learned that she was charged for this murder in August of 2023. This was months after it happened. By the way, talking about TruthFinder, you can find out a lot of information on TruthFinder. It's one of the largest

public record search services in the United States. We use it here. TruthFinder can also be used to look up registered sex offenders in an area, which, when you think about it, super helpful piece of mind. And with a paid subscription service, you can get access to unlimited reports about almost anyone. So right now, you can actually get 50% off of your first month of confidential background reports. Just go to truthfinder.com slash LC sidebar. Okay, so back to this. First responders in Shasta County, California, say that on January 5th, 2023, they responded to a call that there was an unresponsive two-year-old in a vehicle near a state highway. EMS, they rushed her to the hospital, but she died that night. Now, a pathologist report apparently noted that there were seven to

15 different prescription drugs in Riley's system. Two years old, remember that. Reading Police quickly launched an investigation. They started digging into what exactly happened here. In a statement from the time of Sylvie's arrest, Detective said, quote, the two-year-old was deliberately provided as well as given access to prescription medication with criminal intent by her mother, Macy Marie Sylvie, 21 years of Reading. It goes on to state, quote, despite knowing her child had consumed multiple medications and was displaying symptoms of overdosage, Sylvie drove the child to a rural area of Shasta County and prevented her from receiving emergency medical aid for multiple hours.

Sylvie then allegedly drove into a town and pretended that an accident happened. You see, at first, investigators say that Sylvie told them her daughter had opened medication bottles at home and ate the pills, but when police told her, they wanted her to take a lie detector test, reportedly they say she fakes suicide. So authorities told the record searchlight in Reading that Sylvie left behind her phone with a note, got another phone number under another name, and got a fake ID. They track her down. Authorities say she kept changing her story about what had happened.

For example, instead of claiming that Riley had opened the prescription bottles, she said she accidentally left them open. She said she had stolen the drugs from her mother because she had been depressed that her child's father was in jail over Christmas. During her sentencing last week, Riley's paternal grandfather, John Harrison said, quote, when I found out that she died, I really can't express the anguish I felt. macy what you did was monstrous i will never understand why you did it she never got to grow up macy you have a lot to atone for so with that i want to bring in special guests right now i think her first time on cyber actually licensed clinical social worker trauma expert sherry botwin is with me right now thank you so much for coming here in person good to see you it's good to see you too

this is a tough case we were talking before i mean i've said it before i'll say it again I cover a lot of cases. I think the ones that deal with children, young children, and the ones that are the toughest to talk about, the toughest to comprehend when you heard about it. What did you think? I think I was having some of the same thoughts. We hear about so many different stories,

but whenever there's a case about a young child, she's so helpless, what is this mom thinking? It's a tragic story, and it's really very sad for so many people involved. Yeah, and when you think about the resolution of this case, that she pled guilty and 33 years to life in prison, you don't have a trial here. From a trauma expert point of view,

I feel that's a good thing, right? Because the family doesn't have to sit through this. Well, and the family doesn't have to re-experience it. They don't have to keep reliving it and hearing the story over and over again. And I think it's also good for the defendant in a way because who wants to sit there and listen to her talking about what she was thinking and why she did what she did?

this doesn't sound like a woman who would have any reasonable explanation because there's nothing reasonable about the story. So it does save people from some of the anguish that can come with a trial. Because it's actually, I was talking about this recently. Trials in them of themselves are very traumatic, but especially if there's a trial and it's appealed and it's overturned and then you have a retrial. This whole system can be very, very traumatic for a number of different reasons because it's a long process. It's an arduous process. How do you counsel people who have to be sitting through these kinds of trials, especially when they're family members? I have worked with people who are plaintiffs and they're in a trial trying to get justice.

I talk to family members and I can tell you just even getting ready to go to trial, I see people, their PTSD gets worse, the depression gets worse. I can't tell you how many times clients have said to me, why am I doing this? Why should I put myself? through this. It's long. It's arduous. It's painful. Sometimes people will say going through the justice system and the months or years leading up to trial, some people will say to me, that part is harder because when I went through the trauma, I survived, I shut down, I did whatever I could to stay alive. But when I go through this period of preparing, then I have to feel all this and remember all this over and over. So it can be really hard.

Totally off track. I was talking about some of this today. Different case, the Harvey Weinstein case, he's so sick. They're talking about, you know, is it possible if he's re-tried? He won't even be in the courtroom. And I made the point that if you have these alleged survivors testifying, him not being in the courtroom would make it easier for them. So, you know, it's just thinking about the impact of trauma. But going back to this case, how do you, what do you say to the family members, forget a trial or not? They're dealing with the loss of a family member. They're dealing now with the loss of a young child what do you say to people in that position sometimes the best thing to do is not to say anything it's just to sit there and let them talk about whatever it is that's going on in their mind because they're going to have such an array of thoughts and feelings and if we sit there and we say things or we try to fix it sometimes inadvertently we'll say things that may make them more upset so if they say what do I do to get through this you say things like you You just keep doing what you're doing and you keep talking and you keep letting people know how you feel.

I feel like when it comes to loss, this kind of loss, the best thing we can do to support the family is just let them be in their feelings and let them say whatever they want. If they're falling apart in it, if they're starting to get depressed, if they're developing PTSD, as someone that cares for them, you would want them to go to a grief counselor or a trauma specialist, someone who really specializes in work. working with people who've had such tragic kinds of losses. How long does it take, not to, not to, you'll never heal, right? You never heal, but how long does it take to somehow get to a place where you can move on in a way?

You know, I think it's different for everybody. People are all unique in how they deal with grief. So there's not like a time, it's not like, well, maybe in five years or maybe in ten years. This is what I say to people. you get to the point where you can learn to actually live with whatever happened, when you get to the point where you can continue to forge ahead in your life, have relationships, do the things that make you happy, you're then, you're in a place of healing, you're thriving, because you're now learning to integrate the loss and the tragedy and you use it in a way

to become stronger. You know, a lot of times what I see with people when they go through such horrible crimes, They become advocates for other family members who have lost somebody in a similar way. I see that with all the time with guns and school shootings, parents are getting involved and they're trying to help. So the parents from Michigan are trying to help the parents in Georgia. That's how you get through it. And it can take, it really will be with someone for the rest of their life.

Going back to what happened here, do you see these kinds of cases a lot, parents killing their young children, I'm sure you see that, but killing them with pills to make it look like it was an accident? Because I cover a number of cases where, you know, one of the central legal issues is did the child, the child has bruises on them? Well, was it from them running around and rough housing or was it because of abuse? Here, if you use pills, it's an easy excuse to say, oh, the child took the prescription pills and just, you know, ate them. Here, obviously, the evidence didn't back that story up. But do you see these kinds of cases a lot? I see this all the time. Really? Crimes like this, that, you know, the manipulation,

the calculation in this woman's mind, I think she's thinking about before, how do I do this in a way where I can then place blame on the child? Do I think that she's thinking about it logically and consciously? No, but I think people who are capable of committing such horrible crimes are also they're very manipulative. They know how to like trick people because I think that's what she was trying to do. She's trying to say this young

two-year-old somehow ingested the pills on her own. If she had killed the kid in another way, it would have been harder for her to get away with it. Is there any way to explain this, to understand why somebody would do this?

I thought about that a lot. When you asked me to come on to talk about this story, I thought, how do I explain to people why these types of crimes happen? I have two thoughts. There's those people who are just very mentally ill. This woman, her husband was incarcerated, that can make people very depressed, angry. Did she have trauma in her childhood? Was she feeling abandoned? And then there's also people, they're not necessarily mentally ill, but they're angry. They want to get back at someone. And they want to want to they want revenge and then the only other way i could explain this to you without knowing

her is was she so sick or did she have such a horrible trauma history that when this whole scene occurred was she even there was she was she present at all was she dissociating through the entire mentally like was she actually watching her child die or was she sitting in that car dissociating and leaving the just like leaving the scene because that was something that I thought about too, right? You know, there's one thing to, you move forward, I'm going to poison my child, but to watch her suffer and not get her medical aid. So whether or not, whatever the story was, she didn't render medical aid.

I mean, it was the number one red flag. How does someone just go through with that? Either you're so sociopathic and you have no ability to actually feel anything about what's going on for someone that you're supposed to love, like your own child. or you're just so sick and so detached and you know our brains are very tricky was she sitting there in denial was she like actually in that car and thinking maybe it'll be okay or I don't think I did what I just did I would love to talk with her and say what were you actually thinking as you sat there and watched your child die you think you get a real answer I think there's a multitude of responses that

I could get. And I think the first thing I thought of when I read the story was, what happened to this woman growing up? Where did all this anger and these sociopathic tendencies come from? Was having a child that triggering for you that you couldn't even have her in your life? That's what I would want to ask her. I would say to her, what happened to you growing up? Like, what happened to you when you were two, three, five, ten years old? I don't know if I would get an answer. Do you think if we look closely at this case, maybe other cases, would there be red flags before somebody would kill their child? Would there be things leading up to it? Or have you seen cases?

Comes out of nowhere. You would never know. Usually in cases like this, we may not see the red flags in the public, but abuse is something that escalates over time. So she was only two years old. If she was in a daycare setting, maybe they would have seen that this child was irritable or, lagging and development, that's possible. But unless there's bruises on a child, we may not. The public may not see the red flags, but if I were to go into the home and live there for a year, most likely there were many red flags that led up to this. Usually people don't just do something

this horrible. There's usually many other events that will lead up to it. And that's one of the questions that I have. You know, I say, I use this word a lot. I say it's unthinkable. It really is unthinkable this case. But Sherry Botwin, thank you so much for coming on. It was a pleasure to have you on set and look forward to talking with you again. Me too. All right, everybody, that's all we have for you right now here on Sidebar. Thank you so much for joining us. And as always, please subscribe on Apple Podcast, Spotify, YouTube, wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Jesse Weber. I'll speak to you next time. You can binge all episodes of this long crime series

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