Texas man gets life for killing 6-year-old girl (AP)

[Yahoo!_news]

AP - A man charged with killing a 6-year-old girl whose half nude, lifeless body was found hanging from the rafters of her family's garage pleaded guilty to capital murder Friday and was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Shaun Earl Arender, 21, pleaded guilty and then testified about the murder of Hanna Mack as part of a plea deal.

Hanna's mother, Dana Mack, found the body of her youngest daughter when the first-grader would have been getting ready for school in September 2007. A DNA sample taken from Hanna's shirt indicated Arender was a possible match, according to an arrest affidavit.

The affidavit said "the defendant was then and there in the course of committing or attempting to commit the offense of aggravated sexual assault against Hanna Mack."

Navarro County authorities later confirmed she was sexually assaulted.

Arender testified Friday that he and the former live-in boyfriend of Hanna's mother assaulted the girl after the men had spent the night smoking marijuana and talking about pornography. He said when the girl screamed during one of the assaults, the boyfriend grabbed her by the throat.

"After he started choking her again, she finally ended up passing out again," Arender testified. "I just flipped out more and started hollering. ... I said, `She's dead.'"

He said when they realized she was dead, they decided to hang the girl and make the house look like it had been ransacked.

Hanna died of asphyxiation, the affidavit said.

Arender, who lived less than a mile from the Mack home in Navarro Mills, about 65 miles south of Dallas, was charged nearly three weeks after the girl's body was found. He was out on parole on unrelated petty theft and burglary charges at the time of the murder.

Navarro County District Attorney Lowell Thompson said Arender's testimony alone wasn't enough to prosecute the former boyfriend, and the decision whether to charge him would come after a separate investigation.

The former boyfriend was in jail on child pornography possession charges, a jail official said Friday.

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