Cheri Akil (Tarrant County Jail), John Peter Smith Hospital (YouTube/screengrab)
A female inmate arrested on DUI and financial crimes charges and who was described as potentially suicidal admitted to punching a pregnant hospital staffer in an assault that police claimed killed the fetus.
Cheri Akil, 39, pleaded guilty to a charge of assaulting a public servant and prosecutors will recommend she be sentenced to two years in prison, according to a plea agreement obtained by Law&Crime.
As Law&Crime previously reported, Akil was accused of punching the pregnant hospital worker in the stomach just after noon on April 12 at John Peter Smith Hospital in Fort Worth, according to Dallas ABC affiliate WFAA. Akil had been in custody for allegedly driving while intoxicated and for intentionally/knowingly operating an illicit game room.
Akil, whose Facebook page identified her as a “stay-at-home parent,” was allegedly being restrained in bed by hospital staff when she punched the hospital employee.
After the punch, hospital staff discovered that the pregnant woman’s unborn child no longer had a pulse. Akil was initially charged with murder, but a grand jury indicted her only for assault of a public servant.
Jessica Virnoche, the executive director of communications for the JPS Health Network, released a statement after the attack saying, “At JPS Health Network, the safety and wellness of our team members is our top priority,” she said. “JPS takes Workplace Violence incidents very seriously and has processes in place to assess and address environmental risks. Due to individual and patient privacy rules, JPS is not in a position to provide any additional information about this incident at this time.”
An October 2018 report from Abilene ABC affiliate KTXS named Akil one of 40 people facing indictments in Taylor County. That was a meth possession case that led to a guilty plea in June 2021 with a deferred adjudication of a sentence of three years of community supervision and 160 hours of community service, Taylor County court records reviewed by Law&Crime show.
Prosecutors filed a motion to revoke that deferral in October 2022. A docket entry from Jan. 4, 2023, said that Akil was declared guilty, her deferred community supervision was revoked, and a seven-year probation period went into effect. Another motion to revoke community supervision was filed on April 17, the day Tarrant County records listed Akil as subject to a hold in the meth possession case.
In June 2021, the judge who accepted the meth possession guilty plea found Akil to be mentally competent.
Law&Crime’s Matt Naham contributed to this report.
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