A deranged North Carolina mom asked a photographer to create commemorative photos with the 2-year-old daughter she was later charged with killing.
Now the Pennsylvania photographer is haunted for agreeing to do the Photoshop job.
"It's sickening. I did it to help a grieving mother and I was used. I have not slept in the last few days," Sunny Jo, 22, the Pennsylvania-based photographer told the Daily News.
Jeanie Ditty, a 23-year-old active-duty solider at Fort Bragg who asked Jo for the photos, and her boyfriend, Zachary Keefer, 32, were arrested last week for the beating death of Ditty’s daughter, Macy Grace.
Little Macy was found unresponsive inside their Spring Valley, N.C., home on Dec. 2, and died two days later from her injuries.
Before the couple was arrested, they went to great lengths to play the part of a grieving couple and reached out to Jo, who specializes in editing photos so that lost loved ones appear in them as angelic figures.
Jeanie Ditty, 23, is an active-duty soldier based in Fort Bragg. She and her boyfriend, Zachary Keefer, 32, are charged with first-degree murder in the death of Ditty's 2-year-old daughter.
Ditty told Jo that her daughter had tragically died after she became sick from eating a banana and choked on the vomit.
“It’s so morbid,” Jo told The News. “She contacted me exactly a month after the girl died."
Jo had been so overcome with sympathy for Ditty, whom he thought was a grieving young mother, that he offered to do the $500 project for free.
“My heart dropped to my stomach. She just buried her daughter. I was like you can’t charge someone who went through this. This is to help her get through this tough time,” Jo said.
Jo created several images for Ditty, whom he never met in person, using photographs the soldier’s boyfriend took of her at Macy Grace’s grave and Photoshopping in ghostly silhouettes of the little girl.
Ditty posted the photos to her Facebook page — one shows her walking toward the grave with Macy Grace beside her, another shows the girl looking over Ditty’s shoulder at the gravestone, and a third shows the two reading the girl’s favorite book, “The Giving Tree,” on a blanket in the cemetery.
“She was very specific about what she wanted,” Jo said.
The photos posted to Ditty’s Facebook received an outpouring of sympathy from friends.
“Such a lovely photo. You’re in my heart, thoughts and prayer,” Alexandra Cole commented on one. “This broke my heart,” Shelby Morgan said on another one.
But it was all a ruse — while Ditty and her boyfriend were playing the mourning couple and asking for donations through a GoFundMe page, investigators found that the injuries on Macy Grace’s little body were “homicidal” and the result of physical abuse and neglect.
They are both facing first-degree murder charges and negligent child abuse inflicting serious bodily injury in the death of the defenseless girl.
“This is a truly innocent victim and we are going to do everything we can to get justice for this child,” District Attorney Bill West said during a court appearance, according to local network WNCN.
Now Jo hopes the photos will "give a voice" to Macy Grace, whose young life was taken so violently.
"Now I'm doing them for the spirit of Macy, because she didn't have a voice," he said. "I'm sure she was a beautiful angel."
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