ALBANY COUNTY — Kenneth White’s family cried quietly in the courtroom last Thursday morning as his killer read a statement to the judge, expressing her remorse.

Tiffany VanAlstyne, his 20-year-old cousin, was charged with caring for the 5-year-old boy and his two young sisters at the time of his death.

She stood in the same courtroom on Nov. 24 to confess to killing Kenneth on Dec. 18, 2014 in their Knox trailer home and dumping him in a snow bank across Thacher Park Road; she pleaded guilty then to one count of second-degree murder.

Last Thursday, before being sentenced to 18 years to life in state prison, VanAlstyne told Albany County Court Judge Stephen Herrick how sorry she was for having killed Kenneth, saying, “Every day that goes by, it kills me to know what I did. I just wish that I could take it back, but I can’t.”

Her defense attorney, James Milstein, spoke to the court, saying, in part, “Tiffany truly loved Kenneth and his sisters, and she took great pride in how she helped care for them when they were living with her and her mother. She feels nothing but regret and remorse for the hurt she has caused her family.”

This week, Milstein told The Enterprise that he had explored the idea of pleading not guilty by reason of insanity, but he did not want to discuss the strategy in the case.

Asked if he thought Van Alstyne would ever get out of jail, Milstein said, “I would hope so. It was a terrible tragedy and I don’t think Tiffany had any intention to kill her cousin. I think it was just a series of unfortunate circumstances, and, based on her maturity level and her mental health condition, it was, unfortunately, a bad set of circumstances.

“She loved her cousin,” he continued, “she loved taking care of him. I think one telltale sign of that is that even Kenneth’s mother knows that Tiffany would never do anything intentionally to hurt Kenneth.”

VanAlstyne in court spoke directly to her cousin at one point, saying, “Kenneth, my little buddy, you will always be in my heart.”

When she emerged from the courtroom after the sentencing, Christine White, Kenneth’s mother, said in a loud voice, toward the clutch of gathered reporters, “I love my niece.”

“Do you love Kenneth?” The Enterprise asked.

“Of course I do, why would you ask that in my face?” she replied. “I love my son more than anything in this world. But I also love my niece, and I know the kind of girl she was.”  

Asked if she felt conflicted about her loyalties, White said that she was “going to stick by my family.”

A few minutes later, Michelle Fusco, a Hilltown founder of Kenneth’s Army — a group whose stated mission is to support Kenneth and his surviving sisters — could be heard in the downstairs hallway saying that she thought that Brenda VanAlstyne should be prosecuted next.

After the sentencing was over, Albany county District Attorney David Soares lamented to reporters that there had been no one — no family member — to stand up in the courtroom for Kenneth White, to exercise “one of the most fundamental parts of the criminal justice system,” giving a victim’s impact statement. There was no one, he said, to tell everyone what Kenneth White’s favorite toy was, his favorite pajamas, his favorite cartoon.

Soares spoke of Kenneth White and his siblings as “children put on this Earth and more or less left to fend for themselves from this sensitive and tender age.” He called Kenneth “a young person, a baby, brought into this world with nothing, and leaving with the kind of experience that we can only imagine, based on the evidence that was gathered here.”

At the same time, he excoriated Kenneth’s Army, saying that, if people want to do some good, they should form an army to fight for the children who may be living, like Kenneth was, under conditions of poverty and abuse, to make sure that they have food, that they have a warm coat. That, he said, would be doing something good.

Asked whether there might be any additional prosecutions — for instance, of caregiver Brenda VanAlstyne, for neglect or abuse for leaving Kenneth and his sisters in the care of Tiffany VanAlstyne, since Family Court testimony has shown that the then-19-year-old abused the children on multiple occasions before the boy’s death. Soares said that the criminal case was now over, that his office had completed the prosecution of the person responsible for the crime.

Soares added that, if Family Court now wanted to look into questions of culpability of some other kind, in regard to the way that Kenneth and his sisters were parented, he would welcome that. His sole priority to this point, he said, had been to prosecute the person responsible for the crime of murder.

He added that any talk of prosecuting “our witnesses” while the criminal case was ongoing would have placed the evidence, and the entire case, in jeopardy.

Soares said he thought that Tiffany VanAlstyne was unlikely ever to get out of jail. When people receive an indeterminate sentence, he said, with a maximum of life in jail, it is unusual for them to ever get out.

“There are not many people around here who would fight for her,” he added. When she does go before a parole board, which will not happen until 18 years have gone by, family members will have an opportunity to give a response, “and there will be a response from our office.”

Soares spoke about Tiffany VanAlstyne’s bipolar disorder, saying that a defense attorney would try to use bipolar disorder as a mitigating factor, “but it doesn’t prohibit a person from knowing the consequences of their actions.” He said that today, “We recognize mental health issues more, but we also can distinguish among them better.”

He noted that his office has had cases in which a defendant tried to use as a mitigating factor the idea that he had not taking prescribed medication at the time of the crime, but that he had been taking it since. Soares said, “But we don’t accept that, because then you’re relying on their taking their medication in the future.”

Updated on Jan. 22, 2016: Comments from James Milstein were added the week after the sentencing.