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Inset: Alivia Jordan (GoFundMe). Background: Alondra Hobbs during her sentencing hearing for her daughter’s murder (Law&Crime).
A Georgia woman will spend the rest of her life behind bars for admittedly killing her 7-year-old disabled daughter and then allowing the child’s tiny body to mummify in a closet for months.
On Wednesday morning, Alondra Hobbs, 29, pleaded guilty to one count of malice murder, two counts of felony murder, and two counts of cruelty to children in the first degree.
Immediately following Hobbs’ guilty plea, DeKalb County Superior Court Judge LaTisha Dear Jackson sentenced her to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
“She does not want me to make excuses for what she’s done,” her defense attorney said during the sentencing portion of the hearing. “She does not want a trial. She wants to take responsibility. Something that she has not done … it is something she wishes to do now.”
In late June 2023, a call from a disconnected cellphone led DeKalb County Police Department offices to the long-dead and mummified body of Alivia Jordan. The girl was haphazardly hidden in the closet of unit 29 at the Hidden Valley Apartments on Misty Water Drive in Decatur — the DeKalb County seat and part of the greater Atlanta metro area.
“She looked like a real mummy,” a neighbor told Atlanta-based NBC affiliate WXIA at the time of the grim discovery. “You could tell it was a young girl by what she had on and by her hair.”
Five days later, Hobbs was charged with her daughter’s murder.
According to local jail records reviewed by Law&Crime, a woman named Alondra Denise Hobbs had been in and out of the DeKalb County lockup on numerous occasions in recent years. In August 2019, she was arrested on one count of simple assault. In May 2020, Hobbs was arrested on one count of battery with family violence.
In early July 2023, arrest warrants alleged Hobbs left her daughter alone, strapped into a stroller, “with no intention of returning.”
Authorities believe the child had been left alone, helpless, to die, sometime between Feb. 28, 2023, and June 25, 2023.
In the days that followed the grim discovery, neighbors suggested the defendant long had something sad on her mind, to the point of wanting to take her own life. Meanwhile, family members were struck by the news — long believing the girl had been in the care of relatives on her father’s side.
During a subsequent police interview, Hobbs would eventually admit her daughter was alive when she left her confined in the closet — saying she abandoned her because her life was “too much.” The defendant described Alivia as autistic; medical records showed the girl suffered from seizures related to cerebral palsy.
“This is a very tragic case. There are always options,” the judge said during the hearing. “There’s very rare cases where a murder case does not involve a weapon — a physical weapon — and sometimes hands are a physical weapon. And it’s difficult. How do you process that?”
In a presentation before the court, the district attorney’s office said evidence suggested Hobbs was largely remorseless. When the defendant was asked whether she wanted her daughter to have a funeral, she said she did not care because no one had ever helped raise her.
Additionally, Hobbs said “she did what she did to Alivia or she was going to kill herself,” a prosecutor told the judge.
In the aftermath of the child’s abandonment, the defendant continued to cash her daughter’s $900 monthly disability checks, the prosecutor said.
Then, once Alivia was gone, Hobbs began “dating immediately,” which quickly culminated in her being cheated on, the prosecutor added. That cheating experience, Hobbs would later tell investigators, was the worst day of her life.
The defendant’s own lawyer sought for his client — but did not receive — a sentence of life with the possibility of parole.
“She wants to atone for what she did,” the defense attorney said. “And she is seeking some mercy. Even with the tragic facts of this case — and they are, they’re beyond — a person who confesses, a person with remorse, a person who begs for mercy should find some in our system.”
In the end, mercy was not offered.
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“Alivia Jordan did not deserve the slow, painful, and lonely death she suffered at the hands of her mother,” DeKalb County District Attorney Sherry Boston said in a press release. “I extend my deepest condolences to her family and I hope that they take some comfort in knowing Alondra Hobbs is being held accountable for her actions. I want parents to know that abandoning a child is never the right choice.”