The Detroit-area woman who admitted to having sex with her 16-year-old birth son will serve between 9 and 30 years behind bars.
Aimee L. Sword is a 36-year-old mother of five children who, judging by her picture, looks normal and pretty on the outside but is obviously seriously messed up on the inside.
She apologized for her crime of incest at a sentencing hearing Monday. Initially pleading not guilty, she eventually pleaded guilty to one count of first-degree criminal sexual conduct in a deal with prosecutors.
Sword, a former makeup clerk at Macy's, gave the child up for adoption when he was young—some reports say the child was 5, others say he was an infant when the adoption went through. She had been receiving yearly reports on the boy from the adoptive parents until 2008, so she decided to track him down on Facebook. The two developed a relationship that led to the boy staying with Sword at her Grand Rapids, Michigan, home.
Authorities say she had sex with the boy at her home and at an area motel, although she insists it happened only once.
"When she saw this boy, something just touched off in her—and it wasn't a mother-son relationship, it was a boyfriend-girlfriend relationship," Sword's attorney, Mitchell Ribitwer, told the New York Daily News. "Aimee's searching for a reason why this happened. She can't understand it."
Now she'll have plenty of time to explore those reasons.
Image via Oakland County Sheriff's Office
