Derrick Wilborn, a Seal Beach resident and Army sergeant based in Long Beach, was reportedly convicted in military court of negligent homicide and Court Martialed for his role in the 2009 death of his 23-month-old daughter.
Linda Ann Wilborn, the soldier's wife, previously pleaded not guilty in civilian criminal court to three felony counts of child abuse and assault
on a child causing the death of little Millicent Wilborn.
]
Patch's Nancy Wride gets the scoop on the Derrick Wilborn case. The sergeant first class, who is stationed at the Los Angeles Medical Recruiting Command in Long Beach, was convicted by a panel of officers at Fort Irwin on
counts of negligent homicide, child endangerment by culpable
negligence resulting bodily harm and child endangerment
by culpable negligence resulting in grievous bodily harm. His sentence also included 90 days of detainment.
His wife is looking at a much stiffer sentence behind bars with a conviction. I previously detailed the disturbing allegations against her, which not only concerned Millicent, who died of blunt force trauma to her head and chest, but the couple's three other children who were taken into protective custody.
The 33-year-old mother, who had caught the attention of Social Services in 2008 for leaving then-four-month-old Millicent and her twin alone in a car, called 9-1-1 the afternoon of Dec. 17, 2009, to report the girl was not breathing. Several incorrect addresses were give to the dispatcher, who eventually figured out where to send responders based on GPS coordinates.
Seal Beach Police arrived to find the little girl lying without a pulse on the floor of a back bedroom. She had bruising on her chest that Linda Wilborn reportedly blamed on roughhousing.
When Derrick Wilborn arrived home, a police officer told him that an ambulance had just taken Millicent to the hospital, prompting the father to reply, “What
else can go wrong?” before walking into the home, ignoring
his wife and cutting open a box containing three golf clubs. He explained to the cop, “Building golf clubs relaxes me.”
When officers asked the couple about gnaw marks observed on a bedroom door jamb, the couple responded that their children would also eat carpet and paint
chips peeled from walls.
Police managed to get the couple to go to Los Alamitos Medical
Center, where a doctor informed them Millicent had died. After about 15 seconds of silence, Linda Wilborn cried out loud for about a minute, the same amount of time her husband quietly sobbed. An investigating detective then left them alone–with his audio recorder running.
As I previously reported, Linda was heard saying such things to her husband as “I don't know what God is telling me” and “If you knew he told you I was gonna do something,
you should have told me something.”
Derrick Wilborn is heard telling his wife God had told him Millicent was dead.
“When I was driving on the road, he told me. . . . I didn't know what
was going on, because I thought I was hearing the wrong voice.”
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.