The case closed with a maximum plea sentence and a renewed public focus on how Charlotte Buskey died inside her father’s home.
SCHENECTADY, N.Y. — A judge on Friday sentenced Robert S. Buskey Jr. to 27 years to life in prison, saying the Schenectady father will live in better conditions behind bars than the ones he forced on the 5-year-old daughter he admitted starving to death.
The sentence followed Buskey’s Jan. 23 guilty plea to second-degree murder and criminal sale of a controlled substance to a child. It ended the murder case without trial testimony from first responders, police investigators and medical experts, but the sentencing hearing still laid out a grim account of what authorities called a house of horrors on Elmer Avenue, where Charlotte Buskey died in April 2024 and her younger brother was found living in a makeshift cage.
Judge Matthew J. Sypniewski used the hearing to frame the punishment in blunt terms. He told Buskey that he would spend the rest of his life locked up in surroundings that offered food, water and a bed, things the judge said Charlotte did not have in her final days. Buskey answered through tears, saying he understood why he was being prosecuted and why others viewed him as a monster. He said he accepted responsibility for what happened to Charlotte and to Jackson, his son. The exchange came after months of court proceedings that began with the discovery of Charlotte’s body on April 14, 2024, when emergency responders were sent to the home for an unresponsive child.
Prosecutors said their investigation showed Charlotte had been neglected and malnourished for months, then shut inside a bedroom with a lock mounted on the outside of the door. When she managed to get out at one point, investigators said, Buskey reinforced the setup so she could not escape again. Inside the room, they said, there was no proper bed, only a pack-and-play so small she had to lie curled in a fetal position. Deputy Chief Assistant District Attorney Christina Tremante-Pelham told the court that Charlotte died in a house that still had food in it, including boxes outside the locked bedroom. She said the girl weighed 30 pounds when she died at age 5 and had severe dehydration, while her younger brother was confined elsewhere in the home and both children had cocaine in their systems.
The facts presented in court added to a broader picture of isolation. Prosecutors said the children had stopped seeing relatives, were no longer going to doctor appointments and had never been enrolled in school. Their world, Tremante-Pelham said in the plea announcement, narrowed to the inside of the residence as Buskey used drugs, played video games and avoided caring for them. The district attorney’s office argued that the conduct fit depraved indifference murder, a charge reserved for behavior so reckless and inhuman that it shows total disregard for whether someone lives or dies. At sentencing, the judge adopted that view and described Buskey as deeply selfish and without empathy for a child starving behind a closed door.
Buskey’s lawyer, Assistant Public Defender Joseph Litz, said the case also reflected untreated addiction and mental health problems. He pointed to Buskey’s struggles after leaving mixed martial arts and suggested that people and institutions around the family failed to recognize what was happening inside the house. Sypniewski pushed back on any effort to turn the hearing into a wider trial of government systems, saying the case was about Buskey’s actions. Still, the defense comments echoed public unease about missed warning signs. By the time of the plea, Buskey had agreed to the maximum sentence allowed by law, 25 years to life for murder plus two additional years for the drug offense, and he waived his right to appeal.
The hearing also touched on the surviving child and the other criminal case tied to the home. Buskey’s son, now 5, has been placed with an uncle, and prosecutors said he is doing better in a safe environment. The sentence included an order of protection barring Buskey from contacting the boy for 35 years. Separately, Buskey’s former girlfriend, Brandi Terhune, pleaded guilty in 2025 to tampering with physical evidence and two misdemeanor counts of endangering the welfare of a child. She is expected to serve probation, not prison. Her attorney said she had been abused by Buskey and began cooperating with investigators early in the case.
Friday’s sentencing closed the main prosecution, but the details laid out in court ensured the case will remain a reference point in Schenectady for years. The hearing ended with Buskey led from the courtroom to begin serving a sentence measured in decades, while Charlotte’s death remained the central fact the court returned to again and again: a child left alone, locked away and dying inside her own home.
Author note: Last updated April 6, 2026.