Charles City woman sentenced to 25 years for trying to kill mother

By Bob Steenson, bsteenson@charlescitypress.com

A Charles City woman who had been convicted in August of trying to kill her mother was sentenced Monday to up to 25 years in prison.

Jennifer Bean, age 45, appeared in Floyd County District Court Monday morning for sentencing on a conviction of attempted murder, for injecting her mother with insulin at least twice without her mother’s permission in November 2018.

In a tearful statement to District Court Judge Christopher Foy before sentencing, Bean said she regretted that day and regretted that her mother thought she had tried to kill her.

But Foy said that Bean’s statement showed she was sorry for what her mother and others thought about her actions, not for what she had done.

Foy said the jury had decided that “the only reasonable explanation” for Bean’s actions was that she was trying to kill her mother.

During a victim’s impact statement, Bean’s mother said the experience left her having nightmares and said her daughter deserved her jail sentence.

Under Iowa law, a conviction for attempted murder is a B felony and is among a set of crimes that requires the person sentenced to serve a minimum of seven-tenths — 70% — of the time before being eligible for parole or work release. That would be 17½ years in this case.

Prosecutors presented medical testimony during the trial that said Bean’s mother’s blood glucose level and potassium level were both significantly below normal when she was admitted to the hospital after being injected with insulin, and if left untreated could have resulted in coma, cardiac problems or death.

Bean’s mother was not diabetic and had not been prescribed insulin, and testimony during the trial showed Bean had gotten bottles of insulin from someone else.

Bean’s defense team had argued that Bean, who was trained as an emergency medical technician (EMT), was concerned about her mother’s health, because her mother had been diagnosed with breast cancer and wasn’t taking her prescribed medications, instead relying on treatments that she read about on the internet and that affected her mental state.

Testifying on her own behalf, Bean had said that her mother had been controlling and would not let Bean discuss her mother’s condition with her oncologist.

Bean thought that injecting her mother with insulin would result in her losing consciousness so that Bean could call an ambulance and have her taken to the hospital, where her medical condition could be evaluated, she said during emotional testimony.

“She made an impulsive and not very well thought-out plan to create an emergency room visit so she could tell the doctors what is going on,” one of her attorneys, Steven Kloberdanz of Mason City, said in closing arguments during Bean’s trial.

But prosecutors argued that Bean, as an EMT, knew she could contact her mother’s physician any time to express her concerns.

“She would have known where that information came from,” Bean responded. “I was the only one there.”

The Floyd County jury deliberated 2½ hours on Aug. 19 before returning its guilty verdict.

Before sentencing, Bean had sent a hand-written statement to Judge Foy, asking that her attorneys be fired, and another 13-page hand-written note asking for a new trial and pointing out several areas where she said her attorneys failed to properly handle her case or where procedures had not been followed correctly by police investigating the case, or by the court during the trial.

Foy ruled against her motion to dismiss her attorneys, and her attorneys filed a formal motion for a new trial, which Foy also ruled against before sentencing Monday.