Left inset: Mary Cornelius (St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department). Right inset: Mattison Johnson (Midlawn Memorial Gardens, Inc.). Background: The residence in Missouri where Mary Cornelius shot and killed Mattison Johnson during a game of Russian roulette (KSDK).
A Missouri teen is headed to prison for killing her 16-year-old girlfriend during a game of Russian roulette, with prosecutors saying she shot the victim in the head while “spinning the gun around her finger,” according to her mom.
“That”s apparently when the trigger was pulled and the gun killed my daughter essentially,” Nicole Pettis, Mattison Johnson’s mother, told local NBC affiliate KSDK after Mary Cornelius, 19, was sentenced to seven years in prison Thursday after she pleaded guilty to first-degree involuntary manslaughter.
Johnson’s two young sisters, ages 9 and 11, were with the two teens when the shooting occurred at their home on Jan. 3, with one of them finding her, Pettis says.
“It was my nine-year-old daughter,” Pettis recalled. “She said, ‘Mommy, you got to get home’. I couldn’t even really understand her, but she was hysterical. She said, ‘Mommy, Matti was shot.'”
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Pettis says her daughter was allegedly in an abusive relationship with Cornelius, who was accused of negligently handling the firearm that the two teens used while playing Russian roulette. The mother has said publicly that she believed Cornelius did not shoot Johnson by accident.
“I will get justice for my daughter,” Pettis told reporters when Cornelius was first charged. “I don’t want to see anything bad happen to her besides sit behind bars, think about it for the rest of your life, hold that image in your head for the rest of your life of what you did to my daughter. I hope that she haunts you, God forgive me, but I hope that my daughter eats her alive every night when she goes to bed.”
Cornelius reportedly apologized in court at her sentencing last Thursday, as did her sister. “A child is gone, so you’ll have to take responsibility,” the sister said, according to KSDK.
