4-year-old girl drowned by NYC mom was ‘scared to go back to mommy’ before she, siblings were killed: father
A 4-year-old girl, Liliana Stephens Merdy, expressed fear of returning to her mother before being drowned along with her siblings by their mother, Erin Merdy. Erin Merdy was sentenced to 20 years to life in prison after confessing to the tragic drownings, which were attributed to her struggles with postpartum depression. The children's father shared heartbreaking details about their last moments, highlighting the family's ongoing grief and loss.
- ▪Liliana Stephens Merdy told her father she was scared to go back to her mother before her death.
- ▪Erin Merdy was sentenced to 20 years to life in prison for drowning her three children.
- ▪The tragic incident occurred in September 2022 and was linked to Merdy's postpartum depression.
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Record
| Original publisher | New York Post |
| Canonical URL | https://nypost.com/2026/05/20/us-news/4-year-old-girl-drowned-by-nyc-mom-was-scared-to-go-back-to-mommy-before-brutal-killing-father/ |
| Publication time | Wed, 20 May 2026 19:46:02 -0400 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-20T23:50:03.105Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-20T23:55:58.077Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | TACCrMcBu7nw |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Metro 4-year-old girl drowned by NYC mom was ‘scared to go back to mommy’ before she, siblings were killed: father By Jordan Donegan and Kyle Schnitzer Published May 20, 2026, 7:46 p.m. ET See more of our coverage in your search results. Add The New York Post on Google A 4-year-old girl who was drowned by her mother off Coney Island had tragically begged not to be sent home — telling her father she was “scared to go back to mommy” before she was killed alongside her siblings, he revealed Wednesday at his ex’s sentencing. Shamir Small, the father of Liliana Stephens Merdy, said his daughter was fearful of going to see mom Erin Merdy, and he heartbreakingly shared that he told her, “I hope I see you again” before the child was brutally killed by her troubled mom in Sept. 2022.
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