Morning Mix Grandmother who punished 9-year-old with fatal run dies in prison

Joyce Hardin Garrard, the Alabama woman serving a life sentence for punishing her 9-year-old granddaughter with a fatal running regimen, is dead.

Garrard, 50, who was brain dead after suffering a heart attack at the beginning of the week, died Friday, her son’s attorney told AL.com. She was convicted of murdering her granddaughter and subsequently sentenced to life in prison last year.

“This is another loss for a family that already has lost so much,” Dani Bone, the attorney who defended Garrard at her trial last year, told the Associated Press.

Prosecutors cast Garrard as a heartless taskmaster who was bent on punishing Savannah Hardin one February Friday in 2012 for stealing candy from a peer and lying about it. Garrard argued that she was training Hardin for races, the AP reported at the time.

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