Evil Mum: Sheriff Was Ready To Commit Suicide After What He Saw| True Crime Documentary

Evil Mum: Sheriff Was Ready To Commit Suicide After What He Saw| True Crime Documentary

No, I can’t do—I can’t do this. I can’t DO THIS. I… I can’t… I CAN’T DO THIS. I CAN’T DO THIS. I WANT OUT! I WANT… [screaming] [screaming]

July 19th, 2023. A little after 1:00 in the afternoon, a mother named Brooke Paige pulls into a driveway in Macclenny, Florida, to pick up her 10-month-old daughter. The same routine drop-off she’d done a hundred times before. Nothing about that day felt different. Nothing warned her. The woman watching her daughter wasn’t some stranger from an app or an agency. She was as close to family as you could get without sharing blood: her own grandmother’s best friend, a babysitter this small Florida town had trusted with their kids for years.

Brooke had no reason in the world to worry, except when she knocked, nobody answered. She called out, “Where’s my daughter?” and watched the babysitter take off running—not toward the front door, but toward her own SUV, still parked in the driveway, windows up, engine off. And there she was, 10-month-old Aria Paige, still strapped into her car seat in the back.

Beside her, completely untouched, sat the diaper bag Brooke had packed that same morning: diapers, wipes, a pacifier, medicine, just in case. Aria had never made it inside that house. Not once, all day. For five hours, on one of the hottest afternoons of that Florida summer, a 10-month-old baby had been sitting alone in a locked, parked car.

Firefighters would later clock the temperature inside that SUV at well over 133°. Brooke dropped to the pavement and started CPR right there in the driveway, begging her daughter to breathe, while the babysitter called 911. Here’s the detail that would follow this case all the way into a courtroom over a year later.

When investigators finally asked her, “How do you forget a baby for 5 hours?” her answer wasn’t a chaotic house full of screaming kids or a moment of panic. She told them her mind had simply drifted, caught up in thoughts about an unrelated family event. That was it. That was the explanation for 5 hours of silence. This is one of those true crime cases that still splits a room right down the middle: a horrifying accident, or something a Florida jury needed to call murder.

I’m walking you through this whole case start to finish in this documentary. But first, if you’re watching, drop where you’re tuning in from in the comments and what time it is right where you are. And if real true crime stories like this one are what you come back for, go ahead and subscribe because this isn’t the only one. Now, back to Macclenny.

—

### The Roots in Baker County

Because to understand how a woman this trusted ended up in that driveway, we have to go back years to when Aria’s parents were just two teenagers falling in love. To understand how Aria Paige ended up in that driveway on July 19th, we have to go back 7 years to 2016 in a stretch of northeast Florida called Baker County.

The kind of small, close-knit community where most families know each other by name, where a piece of local news travels down Main Street before it ever makes it onto the internet. That’s where two teenagers, Justice Paige and Brooke, fell for each other in high school. Around Macclenny, everybody knew them as a couple—the kind of high school romance that people assume won’t last past graduation. Except this one did. It wasn’t some short-lived teenage romance. They stayed together for the next 5 years, and on October 9th, 2021, they got married. Justice’s parents took to Brooke almost instantly, the kind of in-laws who treat you like their own daughter from the very first introduction.

Not long after the wedding, Justice and Brooke decided they were ready to start a family. In January of 2022, they learned Brooke was pregnant. It would be the first grandchild on both sides. And by every account, the whole family was overjoyed, especially Justice’s mother, Pamela, a registered nurse who could hardly wait to meet her first granddaughter.

They started doing what every excited set of parents does: picking out a name, painting a nursery, imagining a future that at the time looked simple and peaceful. But the pregnancy didn’t go the way anyone had planned. Brooke developed preeclampsia, a condition that sends a mother’s blood pressure dangerously high and threatens both her life and the baby’s.

There wasn’t much warning. The due date had been October. Instead, on September 4th, 2022, at 11:31 in the morning, Aria Renee Paige arrived nearly 6 weeks early, just over 4 pounds and 17 inches long, small enough to fit in her father’s palm. She spent her first two weeks of life in the NICU at Wolfson Children’s Hospital in Jacksonville, her parents watching over an incubator instead of a crib before doctors finally cleared her to go home.

From that point forward, Aria was, by every account, spoiled with love. Her grandmother liked to call her “Granny’s girl” every time she walked into the room, and Aria would just laugh. Her grandfather said that the moment he got home from work, she’d reach her arms out to be picked up, then grab hold of his beard and pull with everything she had.

Her first word was “Da.” She loved riding in the car with her mother, the two of them turning the radio up for what Brooke called their jam sessions. She was already pulling herself up on the furniture, working on her first steps. And she loved the water—loved it so much that Justice had already bought her a boat for her first birthday, a birthday she would never get to celebrate.

—

### The Babysitter and the Routine

Brooke took 12 weeks of maternity leave. Justice took leave, too, and the two of them spent every single day of it with their daughter, dreading the moment they’d have to go back to work. When that moment came, the Pages did what a lot of young families do: they leaned on the people closest to them.

A relative agreed to babysit at first, and that worked fine until the relative’s own kids came home for summer break. That’s when Brooke reached out to a longtime family friend, a woman with a standing reputation around Baker County for how well she looked after other people’s children. Her name was Rhonda Juul. She was 46 years old, married to a man named Robert, and a mother of three grown children herself.

Around town, people didn’t think of her as a business or a service or even really a babysitter in the formal sense. She was just Rhonda—someone’s aunt, someone’s neighbor, the woman half of Macclenny had trusted with their kids at one point or another. She’d started babysitting as a teenager at 17, then stepped away for years to raise her own kids before returning to childcare in 2017.

She wasn’t a licensed daycare. She was the kind of babysitter small towns like this one still run on, paid in cash, passed along by word of mouth, watching a handful of kids at once in a house that was by nature a little loud and a little chaotic most mornings. And Rhonda wasn’t some name pulled off a referral list. She was the best friend of Mon’nique Carter, Aria’s grandmother on her mother’s side. Rhonda had been at Brooke and Justice’s wedding. She’d been in the room at Aria’s baby shower, sitting up front, celebrating the arrival of the very child she would one day be trusted to protect.

So, starting in May of 2023, the Pages built a weekly rhythm around the woman they trusted most with their daughter. Rhonda took Aria on Mondays and Wednesdays, 8:00 in the morning until 1:00 in the afternoon. Pamela—Justice’s mother, the nurse who worked from home—took Tuesdays and Thursdays. Mon’nique, Brooke’s mother, left work early every Friday to watch her granddaughter.

7 days a week, Aria was always somewhere safe, always with someone who loved her, always accounted for. Aria grew up wrapped in an unusually large support system, even by the standards of a close southern town: aunts, uncles, cousins, and great-grandparents on both sides, most of them within a short drive of Macclenny. All of them regular fixtures in her first 10 months of life.

She wasn’t just Brooke and Justice’s daughter. She belonged in the way small towns still let a baby belong to an entire extended family that showed up for her. By summer, it had become pure routine. Rhonda would arrive at the Page home in the morning, buckle Aria into her SUV, and drive her a few miles away to a second house where she watched three other children on top of Aria.

And a little after 1:00 in the afternoon, like clockwork, Brooke would show up to take her daughter home. It was a system that had worked without incident for months. Nobody in that family—not Brooke, not Justice, not even Rhonda herself—had a single reason to believe July 19th, 2023, would be any different from any other Wednesday.

And that’s really what makes this true crime story so hard to sit with. There was no stranger involved here. No red flag anybody ignored. No background check anyone skipped. This was a woman this family had known and trusted for years. Someone who loved that baby, too. Someone with three children of her own, who understood exactly what a child like Aria meant to a family like this one.

And in the space of a few hours, on one of the hottest days of the Florida summer, all of that trust collapsed in the worst way imaginable. Brooke’s arrival, the sprint to the SUV, five hours that had passed without a single check. To really understand this true crime case, though, you need to see how that morning actually unfolded.

—

### The Fatal Morning

It was Wednesday, July 19th, 2023. Around 8:00 a.m., Rhonda Juul pulled up to the Page home in Macclenny to pick up Aria, same as she had most Mondays and Wednesdays that spring. According to her own arrest report, she made one stop along the way, a Burger King drive-thru, but the line was too long, so she kept driving.

From there, she headed to a house a few miles south on Estes Street, where she also watched three other children that summer. By her own account, when she pulled into that driveway, Aria appeared to be asleep in the back seat. So Rhonda made the decision that would define the rest of her life: she left the baby exactly where she was, walked inside, and started her morning with the other kids, telling herself she’d come back for Aria in a few minutes.

She never did. Outside, the temperature that day was already pushing past 96°. The SUV sat out in the open driveway—no garage, no shade, no one checking on it. And inside the house, the morning went on like any other. Kids were fed. Diapers were changed. Small arguments over toys got broken up. Nobody asked where Aria was because, as far as anyone in that house knew, she was exactly where she was supposed to be: asleep, safe, a few feet away, in a routine that had played out the exact same way dozens of times before. Nobody checked on her again for 5 hours.

When Brooke arrived a little after 1:00 and Rhonda ran for that SUV, what she pulled out of the back seat was a baby with blue and purple lips, not breathing. Rhonda carried her into the garage and called 911 while Brooke dropped to the ground beside her daughter and began CPR, following the dispatcher’s instructions and refusing to stop.

“What you need, ma’am?”
“Yes. Get her help, please.”
“Thank you.”
“Yeah, she’s burning up.”
“Got it. Yep. Here, let me help you hold her.”
“I got it.”
“The car doors were open, too. So, she just came out of the car. She’s in the car. She’s turning her neck. Yeah. Let me know when you’re ready.”
“Calling 911 right away. CPR.”
“I CAN’T DO IT. I CAN’T DO THAT. NO, I can’t do—I can’t do this. I can’t do this. [Screaming] I—I can’t—I CAN’T DO THIS!”

Paramedics took over when they arrived and rushed Aria to the hospital.

“Going to Fraser’s 348. Oh, you’re rolling fifth one. Open up an intersection somewhere.”
“Yeah. Y’all Jesus for the long… and the nails, my grandbaby.”
“I understand, they’re going to—they need to work them.”

Aria’s grandmother got there soon after and would later describe watching rescue workers pull her granddaughter from the ambulance still performing CPR and knowing from the look on one paramedic’s face alone that it wasn’t going to end well. It wasn’t enough.

A doctor came out to speak with the family and delivered the news no parent is ever prepared to hear.

“Grandmother! I WANT OUT! I WANT OUT! I WANT OUT! I WANT OUT!” [Screaming]
“I can’t do this. I… I don’t know what to do, but I want to be his eyes.”
“No, no, no. I can’t—I can’t—I can’t do this anymore.”
“I don’t even want it. I don’t want it. It was to pay the babysitter and I don’t want to pay her.”
“Is there somewhere we can take her and be in AC?”
“Let’s go to chapel. Let’s go to chapel. Come on. Come on, girl. She’s going to sound…”

—

### The Arrest and Investigation

The Baker County Sheriff’s Office later released a public statement calling it one of the hardest cases the department has ever had to handle. The sheriff himself wrote that his office had chosen to keep the investigation quiet at first, purely out of respect for a grieving family and a community in shock, and only released the details once Florida’s public records law required them to answer media requests. He asked the county to respond not with anger, but with prayer for everyone involved.

Answers came fast.

“Going up to the sheriff’s house.”
“Take her.”
“Yeah, come back.”
“It won’t take long, just to drop her off and now sit on.”
“Okay.”
“Is there anything we need to do?”
“Yeah, let me look fast.”
“Yeah, that’s a question for her. As of right now, I’m not quite sure.”
“Okay, because I have no details either.”
“Yeah, I got nothing. That’s why I’m asking.”
“Can I—can I come inside with you? Make sure.”
“Tell her bring some ID, too.”
“Can you go with her?”
“Hey, she’s got a change.”
“Have her bring her ID back, too.”
“Could you tell her—tell her to call my husband? Go tell her.”
“Call your husband. What’s his name? What’s his number?”
“He’s done.”
“I’m going to jail. Walmart.”
“Can I have your phone?”
“Walmart side.”

The very next day, Thursday, July 20th, Rhonda Juul was arrested and charged with aggravated manslaughter of a child. She was booked into the Baker County Detention Center.

“Aria from her house. But today was an earlier day because she… the other—the other lady needed me at 8:15. So I picked her up at 8:00, which is usually 8:30. Anyway, so I picked her up and I pulled through Burger King to get something to eat, but the line was too long, so I left and went… I was at State Street. Correct.”
“Mhm, right.”
“Um, so I got there um at 8:15 and the baby was like… because she was asleep and she was quiet and because I don’t keep her every day, I just forgot she was there. So I went inside, got busy with the other kids, and um I talked to the mom throughout the day and it just didn’t click right, but the baby was…”

“So that was at 8:00. What time did you realize the baby was…?”
“You know what time roughly that was?”
“911.”
“When 911 was called.”
“Okay. Um, how many kids were in the car when you got home with her, when you got to that house today?”
“Just her.”
“Just her.”
“Just her.”
“Get her and take her inside.”
“But I’m saying, you said you noticed that she was asleep when you got there.”
“Well, she… I assume she was asleep. She didn’t make any noise.”
“She was making noise.”
“Yeah, I just… I just picked up. Her mom said that she would probably go to sleep. So I was just saying she had fallen asleep, but she wasn’t making… she didn’t make any noise.”
“Okay. And the questions that will come up is, you know, anything on your mind? Are you going through something personally that would cause you not to, you know, think about it?”
“Um, I mean, we have a kid moving to college, so we’re doing that and we’re… we’re going to… London and we’re supposed to go on vacation tomorrow. And…”

At her first court appearance that same morning, a judge set her bond at $25,000 with GPS monitoring and no contact with Aria’s family as conditions of her release.

Word spread through Baker County fast, and it hit differently than an ordinary crime story might have, precisely because everyone involved was so well-known. This wasn’t a case of a dangerous stranger finally getting caught; it was a woman half the town had hired at some point now sitting in a detention center a few miles from her own home. Neighbors set up a meal train for Brooke and Estes almost immediately, dropping off dinners and donations for a young couple who overnight had gone from planning their daughter’s first birthday to planning her funeral.

6 days later, on July 25th, the Baker County community gathered at Christian Fellowship Temple to say goodbye to Aria. Family and friends filed past photographs of a smiling, joyful little girl before she was laid to rest at Chipman Cemetery in nearby Sanderson. She never got the chance to celebrate her first birthday.

“Took a toll on us, our family. Um, there was a couple bumps in the road, um, but we pushed through. We pushed through together as a family, as a community, um, and we just kept going.”
“Was so, so special, um, she… she came into the world, uh, 6 weeks earlier.”
“As a proud granddad, what was it like to hold her for the first time?”
“Well, it was just like holding a brand-new baby, like it was my very own. Aria was a… she was a daddy’s girl and she was her mama’s mini-me. The last moments that we were able to spend with Aria… to look at her, you… you didn’t see… you didn’t see the results of what happened to her. You just saw that sweet baby. She was just asleep, baby. She was just asleep. So, and because she was asleep, I believe she just slept and didn’t wake up.”

And the medical examiner confirmed that’s what happened: that she just slept.

—

### The Fight for Justice and Aria’s Act

But the Paige family didn’t go home and grieve quietly. In those first raw days, Aria’s uncle told a local reporter flatly that the family didn’t trust the local justice system to deliver on its own, that they’d have to push for it themselves. So, they did. Within days, they were out at the intersection of Macclenny Avenue and Sixth Street holding signs that read “Justice for Aria” and “Aria was innocent,” determined that their daughter’s death would mean something.

“That rally is called Justice for Aria. You see dozens of people stationed at the four corners of the intersection of Macclenny Avenue and Sixth Street, a lot of people holding up different signs with pictures of Aria. And their message is that they say they want justice for Aria, including that same message coming from her parents.”

“She grabbed my shirt and pulled up on me, and I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, Aria, I think we’re almost to your first steps.’ She would pull on my chin and the little bit of hair that I have, she’d pull on it, and um, she’d always just come up to me and if I’m asleep, she would slap me and wake me up, and she just… she… she was a daddy’s girl.”

Weeks later, ahead of Juul’s arraignment, they held a second rally, this time outside the Baker County Courthouse itself, an hour before the hearing began. Justice told reporters he’d do everything in his power to get justice for his daughter. Brooke said the only thing keeping her upright some mornings was waking up and reminding herself she had to keep fighting for Aria, and that she was grateful for what she called the army of people standing behind them.

“Every time you do get into a hot car, just remember that that was my daughter in that car for 5 hours. I just don’t want any other babies or any other children to ever experience what Aria did, because it hurts. Do everything that I can to just… to get justice for her.”
“Wake up every day and I tell myself, I got to do this for Aria.”

That determination turned into an actual legislative campaign. Starting that October, Aria’s grandmother, Pamela, began pushing state lawmakers to act. She reached out to a state senator and a state representative, sat through meeting after meeting at the capital, and helped shape what eventually became known as Aria’s Act, a bill built entirely around one goal: make sure people talked about this danger before summer hit, not after.

It moved through the Florida House and Senate with support from both parties, which is rarer than it sounds for any piece of legislation these days. On April 16th, 2024, less than 9 months after Aria’s death, Governor Ron DeSantis signed it into law, officially making April Hot Car Death Prevention Month statewide, timed deliberately to land just before the deadliest months for this exact kind of tragedy.

It wasn’t a symbolic fight, and the numbers back that up. According to federal safety data, a child dies from vehicular heatstroke in the United States roughly once every 10 days. In 2023, the year Aria died, 29 children across the country lost their lives the exact same way, left behind in a hot car. Florida led the nation that year, with seven of those deaths happening within its own borders. And across more than three decades of recordkeeping, only one state has lost more children this way than Florida: Texas is first, Florida is a close second.

Nationwide research breaks these tragedies down into three basic patterns. A little over half the time, like with Aria, a caregiver simply forgets the child is still in the vehicle. About a quarter of the time, kids get into an unlocked car on their own and can’t get back out. And in roughly one out of every seven cases, a child is left in a car on purpose, usually because a parent thought it would only be for a minute. Nearly nine out of 10 victims nationwide are 3 years old or younger. Aria was 10 months.

For the Paige family, none of that—the rallies, the new law, the national attention—was ever going to be enough on its own. There was still a courtroom they hadn’t sat in yet, a jury that hadn’t heard the case, and a woman who was out on bond living her life while they buried their daughter. That fight was only just getting started.

—

### The Trial

November 2024, 16 months after Aria died, the case that had split Baker County finally reached a jury. 12 people would have to decide the exact question this whole story keeps circling back to: was this a horrifying accident, or a crime the law needed to call murder?

The state called Justice first. He told the jury about every future moment he’d never get with his daughter: her first day of school, teaching her to drive, walking her down an aisle someday. He described the moment he saw his daughter carried out to the ambulance under a sheet and called it the worst feeling of his entire life.

“I was looking around, and I asked, ‘Where’s Aria?’ And um, my mom told me that she had passed away.”
“Were you ever allowed to go see Aria?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And where was that at?”
“Um, it’s in a hospital room, but she was laying in the bed.”
“And were other family members allowed in there with you?”
“Yes, sir.”

Then Brooke took the stand. She cried through most of her testimony, and when prosecutors placed the crime scene photos in front of her, she broke down completely.

“Um, she was a very bubbly little girl. Um, she would laugh. She… she was never a bad baby. Um, she was constantly so happy, but she would stare through you like no other person. She didn’t care who you were, even me. She’d look at me and make me laugh at those little goofy looks. Um, at that point, she was saying, ‘Da.’ Um, she was just getting to the point where she was able to pull up on stuff like she was about to start walking. Um, she was just so giggly and happy, so bubbly, such an outgoing baby. I can’t… you would just have to see her and you would just fall in love.”

“State’s exhibit B, State’s exhibit C. Just look at them yourself.”
“Can you approach?”
“Yes, you may approach.”
“Identification. Obviously, you recognize that as well.”
“Yes.”
“What is that? Who is that from?”
“Your Honor, it’s…”
“I’m going to go ahead and proceed, subject to the objections raised to abide.”

She told the jury about the last video on her phone of Aria pulling herself up onto her feet for the very first time, working towards steps she’d never get to take.

“She grabbed my shirt and pulled up on me, and I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, Aria, I think we’re almost to your first steps.'”

The state also called in the people who’d worked the case from the very beginning. A medical examiner testified that Aria died of hypothermia—plain and simple. Her body had overheated from the inside in a sealed vehicle until it simply couldn’t anymore. A firefighter who’d measured the SUV that afternoon told the jury that the thermometer read 133°.

A detective testified about interviewing Juul at the hospital, saying she told him her mind had drifted to an unrelated family event, and that was the only explanation she ever gave him for 5 hours of silence. The prosecution’s argument was direct: Rhonda Juul wasn’t some overwhelmed, sleep-deprived parent juggling too much at once. She was a paid, trusted caregiver whose only job that morning was to keep one baby safe. And she didn’t. To the state, “I forgot” wasn’t an excuse; it was the whole problem.

The defense told a different story: a tragedy, not a crime. No motive, no intent. Nothing in the evidence suggesting Juul meant any harm at all—just a devastating lapse in memory that happened to end in the worst possible way. Juul herself took the stand and described the exact moment it came back to her, the moment Brooke showed up at the door and she realized all at once what she had done.

“She said, ‘I’m here.’ And I said, ‘Here?’ I said, ‘Where you at?’ And she said, ‘Um, I’m at the door.’ And I said, ‘Oh.'”
“Did you go to the door at that time?”
“I did, but I didn’t… I didn’t know why she was there. So I was… I was like, ‘What are you doing?’ And she said, ‘I’m here.’ And I… so I asked her what… where was she at? And she said, ‘I’m at the door.'”
“Did you go to the front door?”
“I… I did.”
“What happened when you opened the front door?”
“Um… she opened… or opened up the door and I seen her and I was still in shock why she was there. And so she had money in her hand and her keys, and that’s when I realized I didn’t get the baby at the car. I forgot… I forgot the… I forgot the baby in the car. And so I pushed her out the way and I was screaming, ‘Oh my god, Brooke! Oh my god! Oh my god, Brooke!’ And she’s… I could hear her saying, ‘What? What? What?’ And I ran to… ran to the car and I opened up the door… and she was still there. Her… was still in the back seat.”

—

### Verdict and Sentencing

On November 8th, the jury reached a verdict that in its own way captured just how divided this case really was. They found Rhonda Juul not guilty of manslaughter—the charge that would have required proof she’d acted with conscious disregard for Aria’s safety—but they found her guilty of third-degree murder and of child neglect under a legal rule that doesn’t require prosecutors to prove she knew what she was doing when she left that baby in the car. In other words, a jury looked at the exact same set of facts and decided this wasn’t reckless enough to be manslaughter, but was somehow still murder.

Outside the courthouse, Brooke told reporters it felt like a weight had finally lifted, like she’d finally done right by her daughter after more than a year of fighting just to get this far. But almost immediately, the family’s attorney made clear the fight wasn’t finished. Standing with the Pages outside the courthouse, he told cameras that if this was where Aria’s story ended—a split verdict, everyone shaking hands, and walking away—then Aria still wouldn’t have gotten real justice.

With a criminal conviction now on the books, he announced the family would be filing a wrongful death lawsuit against Juul in civil court, a separate case seeking a separate kind of accountability, one that didn’t rely on a jury agreeing to call what happened murder.

A month later in December, Juul was back in that same courtroom for sentencing. Her attorney read letters to the judge from parents whose kids she’d once cared for, from neighbors who’d known her for decades, all painting the same picture of a woman who’d been part of the fabric of this community for years. Character witnesses spoke on her behalf, too: her husband, Robert, and her own adult daughter, describing someone who hadn’t been the same since that day, who friends worried wasn’t sleeping, wasn’t eating, was barely holding herself together. Her daughter told the court she was genuinely afraid her mother might not survive her own guilt. Prosecutors asked for 20 years anyway.

The judge landed somewhere in between: 15 years for the murder charge plus two more served consecutively for child neglect—17 years in total, with the possibility of parole after 14. Juul stood and read a statement to Maria’s family, saying she would have traded her own life for the baby’s if she could have, that she’d felt broken every single day for the past 17 months, and that she was sorry beyond words.

“Nothing I can say or do that will ever heal your broken hearts. You will never know how truly sorry I am. I was the go-to person to take care of a child, to make sure she was happy, to make sure she was okay when she went home. I let you down. You trusted me, and I failed to hold up my duties for that day, and I’m truly sorry. Brooke… I have prayed for that, all that could find it in your heart to so forgive me. I pray you remember I love, and I love, love, love y’all. Brooke, we have shared together… shared memories together that are always special, being able to save her sweet memory… memories from moments of your graduation, wedding, baby shower… that will always close my heart, and Justice… the love that you have here… that’s more about my favorite things about you. Your selflessness is admirable. Selfishness is admirable… and I’ll forever be grateful for your friendship. My… you are my best friend. You were my baby. Your kids were my kids. Your kids were your kids…”

Brooke told the court it changed nothing. Her daughter was still gone, and she said so directly, looking at the woman who had once been trusted to bring her home safe every single day.

“I’d be standing here right here today… painting a picture of how Rhonda impacted our lives so much on her careless actions. We had so much trust in our own depth and believed in our daughter would be in the best of care with her. Her being so close to our family and shown no remorse for what she did to us is so careless and agonizing. She has no remorse for what she did. She’s going to games all the time and enjoying herself to go watch her daughter pursue her dreams when I don’t even have the chance to do that because she took my daughter away from me.”

17 years sounds absolute when a judge says it out loud in a courtroom. But under Florida’s system, Juul could actually become eligible for parole in as little as 14 of those years, meaning, barring any change on appeal, the sentence carries a real possibility of ending years earlier than the number itself suggests.

And then less than 2 months into that sentence, everything shifted again. In February of 2025, a judge agreed to let Juul out of prison on a $100,000 bond while her lawyers appealed the conviction, with GPS monitoring, curfew, no unsupervised contact with children under six, but free walking around, sleeping in her own bed. The judge pointed to her clean record before this case, her deep roots in the community, and the fact that nobody considered her a flight risk.