‘I was emotional’: Shanteari Weems, who shot her husband James Weems amid child abuse allegations, reflects on future
WASHINGTON, DC: Shanteari Weems, who is currently serving her sentence in jail for shooting her husband, has spoken in detail about her crime. In a jailhouse interview, the Baltimore woman said that she shot her husband James Weems at Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Washington, DC, after multiple reports of child molestation against him surfaced. “I was emotional,” she told CBS-affiliate WUSA in a recent sit-down session. Weems spoke for the first time after her plea agreement was rejected by a judge.
She is currently held on the counts of aggravated assault and carrying a pistol without a license. Interestingly, prosecutors have asked for a two-year jail term for Weems, but the judge upbraided the sentence and doubled the jail time to 4 years for taking law into her own hands. Weems stuck her husband twice who was facing several child sexual abuse allegations. “I snapped," she said "further revealing that her intention was to confront and kill her husband and later shoot herself too," as per Law&Crime.
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'Despite my surroundings, I’m doing ok'
“Despite my surroundings, I’m doing ok,” Weems told WUSA. “I have a lot of supporters and people who uplift me and help me survive.” The hashtag #freeshanteari often trends online. “The only person I had to find out information from was my husband. And he kept saying he didn’t do it … I did believe him,” said the 50-year-old owner of the playschool for whom her husband worked as a driver. Though police in the area were investigating the allegation, they didn’t tell Weems who was their main suspect in the case.
'I’m not a violent person'
“I saw the pain in her face and I knew she was not lying,” Weems reportedly said when one of the parents spoke to her. “She finally said it was my husband.” Weems shared her emotional turmoil in the interview, “I felt like the blood had just drained out of my body because … it was my husband. He was supposed to help me protect these children. He always told me he was my protector. So when I heard this, I just felt like – I just felt like my world had ended. We were both supposed to be on this crusade of saving children and child molestation is something that we had talked about all the time, how horrible it was. I think about that child all the time. I think about all the children all the time.” She concluded, “I’m not a violent person. The situation was kind of like a fire.”