A New York mother with postpartum psychosis was found not guilty of killing her two young boys after a judge accepted her plea of insanity.
Dimone Fleming, 22, was accused of stabbing her sons, 11-month-old Octavius and three-year-old Daishawn Fleming, multiple times and submerging them in a bathtub on November 26, 2022, according to .
Judge Audrey Stone found Fleming, now 26, not responsible by mєntal disease or defect in Bronx Criminal Court on Monday.
Her decision comes as the world awaits the verdict in the high-profile trial of mom , who has put forward the same defense in the killing of her three children.
Like Clancy, Fleming had been receiving treatment for and anxiety prior to her children’s deaths, according to court records obtained by the .
Fleming was working at a concession stand in Queens and living in a shelter in the Mount Hope neighborhood of the Bronx with her two sons.
She was diagnosed with major depressive disorder and prescribed psycH๏τropic medication by doctors.
However, Fleming was instead using marijuana on a daily basis, which amplified her symptoms.
Dimone Fleming, 22, was charged with first-degree murder in the killings of her two young sons, three-year-old Daishawn Fleming (pictured) and 11-month-old Octavius Canada, but was found not guilty by reason of insanity
Prosecutors said Fleming repeatedly stabbed her two young boys and submerged them in a bathtub in November 2022
Fleming’s case has drawn parallels to that of Mᴀssachusetts mom Lindsay Clancy, who is accused of murdering her three children but has put forward an insanity defense
Psychiatrist Dr Eric Goldsmith, who evaluated Fleming at the prosecution’s request, wrote in a report that the mom-of-two was ‘grossly psycH๏τic and out of touch with reality’ on the night she killed her sons.
Goldsmith said that Fleming was hallucinating and thought the world was coming to an end.
She also believed that a spirit had invaded her body, according to the psychiatrist.
A forensic psychiatric report written by doctors from the defense said Fleming thought her actions ‘were necessary to protect or cleanse her children.’
Fleming was naked from the waist up and holding a children’s book upside down while sitting on a bed when police found her in the shelter, according to prosecutors.
Unlike Clancy’s case, prosecutors did not aggressively pursue conviction, although Fleming was originally charged with first-degree murder.
‘Prosecuting mothers does not and cannot prevent these crimes from happening, but public discourse might,’ Tiffany Wichman, a Bronx ᴀssistant district attorney, said.
‘People talking about it is important, and I hope people continue talking about it.’
Fleming’s lawyer, Jodi Morales, called the result of the case ‘a result of collaboration.’
Fleming was hallucinating and thought the world was about to end, according to a psychiatrist who evaluated her at the prosecution’s request
Fleming’s children were not initially discovered ᴅᴇᴀᴅ by police, they were found by one of the boy’s father
‘Everybody recognized what we were dealing with here,’ she said. ‘That doesn’t happen often when you’re on opposite sides of the table.’
Fleming allegedly stabbed her kids with kitchen shears and covered them with a sheet after placing them in the bathtub.
Police were called to the shelter shortly before 7.30pm after an employee noticed smoke and water emanating from Fleming’s apartment after she left a faucet running and the stove on.
The two children were initially not discovered and Fleming was taken to St. Barnabas Hospital in the Bronx for treatment.
However, Columbus Canada, Octavius’ father and Fleming’s boyfriend at the time, found the kids when he returned home later that night.
Canada was in court on Monday and said he forgave Fleming, who he called a ‘good person,’ according to the New York Times.
‘She was a loving person,’ Canada told the outlet. ‘She loved kids.’
Clancy’s murder trial will return to deliberations on Monday. She is pictured in court on August 28
Clancy strangled her children, Cora, five, Dawson, three, and eight-month-old Callan, in January 2023, and then attempted to take her own life
Going forward, Fleming could be held at a high-security hospital for an initial six months.
That would be extended indefinitely if her condition does not improve.
Should doctors find her to be mentally ill but not dangerous, she could also be sent to a more open hospital for further evaluation.
Fleming could also be discharged if she is found to be mentally fit. However, the court would likely place conditions on her freedom.
Fleming confirmed that she understood the proceedings in court on Monday.
She is expected to return to court on September 18 after being evaluated by court-appointed psychiatrists.
Fleming’s case drew comparisons to Clancy’s murder trial, which will return to deliberations on Monday.
Clancy’s defense team has argued that she when she killed her children and unsuccessfully tried to take her own life.
Judge William Sullivan allowed the jurors to go home for the weekend after they failed to reach a verdict following two days of deliberations.
The jury asked to see the knife that Clancy used to try to take her life, as well as bags of pill bottles found in her home, on Friday.
Postpartum psychosis afflicts roughly one to two per 1,000 women after delivery, according to the .
💔 STELLA PARTON BREAKS HER SILENCE — What She Said About Dolly’s Health Has Fans Looking Back
Dolly Parton’s Sister Breaks Silence What Really Happened - GMT - G1
Stella Parton was born May 4, 1949, the sixth of twelve children raised by Robert Lee and Avie Lee Parton in Sevierville, Tennessee — a household defined by noise, limited money, and almost no privacy, the kind of environment that produced strong, determined personalities.
Stella was one of them.
By seven, she was appearing alongside her older sister Dolly on a Knoxville television program; by her teens, she was writing her own songs, though marriage and motherhood pulled music to the margins of her life for a stretch.
The dream never fully disappeared.
In 1967, she recorded a gospel album with her mother and sisters, and later worked clubs in Washington, D.C., before founding her own record label in 1975 and releasing “I Want to Hold You in My Dreams Tonight,” which climbed to number nine on the country charts.
Long before any of that commercial success, Stella had already shown a willingness to take positions others avoided.
At 26, amid backlash against Australian singer Olivia Newton-John for winning recognition in country music, Stella recorded “Ode to Olivia” in her defense — a stand that offered her no career benefit and real risk of criticism, but one she took anyway simply because she believed staying silent was the wrong choice.
That instinct defined the rest of her career: hits like “The Danger of a Stranger” and “Steady as the Rain” (written by Dolly) built a genuine, independent following, including in the U.K., while Stella also worked in New York theater and spoke openly, often controversially, about poverty, domestic violence, and the treatment of women in the music industry.
She was named the Christian Country Music Association’s Female Vocalist of the Year in 2004.
Through all of it, she remained defined publicly, more often than not, as simply “Dolly’s little sister” — a label she spent five decades quietly proving didn’t tell the full story.
That same directness is why her comments in the fall of 2025 carried real weight.
Stella had never positioned herself as the family’s image manager or spokesperson; she was, by reputation, someone who believed difficult truths shouldn’t stay hidden indefinitely.
What she described wasn’t dramatic or accusatory — it was a portrait of a woman who had spent years prioritizing everyone else’s needs over her own.
The context mattered.
Carl Dean, Dolly’s husband of nearly sixty years, died in March 2025 at 82, after a long illness during which Dolly had devoted herself almost entirely to his care.
She later acknowledged that in the process, she’d neglected her own health significantly.
The loss reverberated through the whole extended family — the Partons had lost three brothers in the years surrounding this period, compounding grief that, for a family that had once crowded twelve children into a single small home, meant losing pieces of a shared childhood one after another.
Stella herself went seven years without releasing new music during this stretch, later describing the period simply as one shaped by sorrow, while still speaking about the importance of finding moments of laughter within it.
Looking back, one moment reads very differently in hindsight than it did at the time: in late September 2025, Dolly postponed her planned Las Vegas residency, citing health challenges — a rare cancellation for a performer whose six-decade career had included very few of them.
At the time, most fans treated it as a minor, temporary setback.
Stella’s later reflections suggested the signs had actually been building for some time, visible to family in ways the public smile made easy to miss.
That concern crystallized publicly not long after, when Dolly’s younger sister Frieda posted a simple request on Facebook asking fans to pray for Dolly.
What looked at first like an ordinary, well-meaning gesture spread rapidly, sparking widespread speculation about how serious Dolly’s condition actually was.
Dolly herself responded directly within days, appearing in a video from a Grand Ole Opry commercial shoot, insisting with her familiar humor that she wasn’t finished yet — the now widely remembered “I ain’t dead yet” moment that briefly quieted public concern.
In the months that followed, the pattern repeated: reassuring updates about kidney stones, dehydration, and treatment, paired with continued work on new projects, right up until Dolly Parton’s death on August 25, 2026, at 80.
Looking back across that full timeline — the postponed residency, the family’s public worry, Stella’s own account of a sister who consistently deprioritized her own wellbeing — it becomes easier to see what the people closest to Dolly understood well before the rest of the world did: that the warmth and resilience the public saw every time she appeared on camera came at a real, largely invisible cost.
