Editor's note: This story has been corrected to reflect Sylvia Hackl's office did return a call from Cowboy State Daily and stated that her office feels the verdict was fair given the evidence presented.
CHEYENNE — A Laramie County jury deliberated less than 90 minutes over two days before convicting Darrick Mittlestadt of Cheyenne on two counts of aggravated child abuse on Friday for nearly starving his adopted 13-year-old son to death.
Mittlestadt, 50, the former fire chief of Laramie County Fire District No. 1, was taken into custody immediately and will remain in jail until sentencing Dec. 28. He faces up to 50 years in prison.
He remained stoic as the verdict was read.
Assistant Laramie County District Attorney Jack Hatfield held out the possibility that Mittlestadt could get even more time behind bars, and accused him of lying to the jury repeatedly when he testified in his own defense over two days.
No perjury charges were filed on Friday.
Laramie County District Judge Peter Froelicher ordered Mittlestadt remanded to the Laramie County Detention Center and set a $500,000 cash bond.
Mittlestadt had been free on a $15,000 bond.
In addition to jailing him, the judge also ordered him to surrender his passport to the sheriff’s office.
Deputies took him out of the courtroom without handcuffs, but he was shackled when he was led down the hallway of the courthouse.
Victim In Courtroom
The victim, now 14 and identified in court as EM because he is a minor, was in the courtroom when the verdict was read.
He sat beside the prosecution table with his foster mother, who hugged him after the conviction.
Several other members of his foster family and supporters sat with him in the front row.
EM, who testified Tuesday, appeared at ease when he entered.
Soon after he sat down with the foster mother who has cared for him for the past year, she took a selfie with him.
Other than that smile, he showed little visible reaction but seemed in good spirits.
His supporters remained silent but were clearly pleased.
Hatfield escorted EM to the Laramie County District Attorney’s Office when court adjourned.
Concentration Camp Survivor
When authorities took EM into protective custody June 22, 2025, after his adoptive mother, Angela Mittlestadt, left him at a youth group home in Douglas and told him to use another name before driving away, he weighed about 50 pounds.
Dr. Andy Sirotnak, a child abuse pediatrician at Children’s Hospital Colorado, testified on the first day of the four-day trial that EM was cachectic and looked like a concentration camp survivor.
Cachexia is a complex metabolic syndrome marked by progressive, involuntary loss of body mass, including skeletal muscle and fat.
“There was no muscle to the bone,” the physician said.
Sirotnak said he has testified in thousands of child abuse cases, but only two or three a year involving anyone as severely malnourished as EM.
The teen gained 15 pounds in the hospital and has continued to gain weight in foster care.
Flight Risk
Hatfield asked the judge to jail Mittlestadt, saying that with a potential half-century prison term, “he’s even more of a significant flight risk than he was.”
“I’m surprised he’s not halfway to Argentina right now,” he added.
Defense attorney Crystal Stewart argued that her client was not a flight risk and noted that his wife, Angela, remains free on bond pending her own sentencing.
Stewart said Darrick Mittlestadt needed time to put his affairs in order.
Angela Mittlestadt
Darrick and Angela adopted EM in 2019, when the boy was 7. They adopted his half-brother, identified in court as NM, a year later when that child was an infant.
NM, now 6, was taken into protective custody June 23, 2025, and removed from the couple’s Cheyenne home.
Angela Mittlestadt, 49, cooperated with authorities and to one count of aggravated child abuse for starving EM and confining him to his room.
A second count of conspiracy to commit aggravated child abuse — a charge on which her husband was convicted — was dropped.
She did not testify at the trial.
Mittlestadt's Mother
Cowboy State Daily asked Mittlestadt’s mother if she wanted to comment on the verdict.
As she held a courthouse door open for her husband, who uses a wheelchair, she dropped her head and walked away.
She attended the trial each day.
Before Froelicher reconvened court for the verdict Friday morning, she entered the courtroom, hugged her son and sat down.
When EM arrived, she asked his foster mother if she could speak with the boy.
The foster mother declined, and Mittlestadt’s mother left.
Her husband, who testified Wednesday as a defense witness, did not attend other portions of the trial.
Deliberations
The jury of nine men and three women and deliberated for less than an hour before leaving for the day.
They returned at 9 a.m. Friday. Froelicher’s office announced a verdict at 9:25 a.m. Court reconvened at 10 a.m. to hear it.
Hatfield declined to comment after the court adjourned Friday morning, explaining that he was not authorized to talk about the case to the media.
He referred reporters to Laramie County District Attorney Sylvia Hackl, who returned a call from Cowboy State Daily stating that her office fels the verdict was fair given the evidence presented.
Closing Arguments
On Thursday, the state and defense presented closing arguments that were starkly different versions of who is responsible for what happened to EM.
Hatfield’s contention — that Darrick fabricated his testimony to try to convince the jury that he was rarely home and had little to do with EM’s day-to-day care beyond listening to what his wife told him — is the one that prevailed.
“You can’t convict Darrick Mittlestadt of a crime he didn’t commit, just because you don’t like him,” Stewart told the jury. “I think there’s plenty of reasonable doubt that he did anything, besides being a crappy dad.”
But prosecutor Hatfield said it was precisely because Darrick did nothing as EM’s father to protect him that the jury should convict him on both counts of aggravated child abuse and conspiring with his wife to withhold the teen’s food and keep him confined to his room and out of sight.
During the trial, it was revealed that the Mittlestadts never took EM to see a doctor during the seven years after they adopted him.
Asked by a detective what EM weighed the last time he was put on a scale, Mittlestadt replied that “we never did that.”
“Whenever I picked him up, he was wafer-thin,” his father said. “I told him he needed to eat more."
Mittlestadt’s defense was that his marriage was in trouble because of arguments he had with Angela about the boys and the family’s finances, and that he was so busy at work he had little time to care for EM, which was his primary responsibility.
He said he spent many nights sleeping at the fire station.
Angela, he said, took care of EM, and he trusted her “100%” to do that. He said she was a good mother to her twin daughters from a previous marriage.
But Mittlestadt, as he ended his time on the witness stand Thursday, blamed his wife for not giving their son enough to eat and she "deceived, misled and lied" to him.
“I should have confirmed that she was telling me the truth,” he said. He also called himself a “bad dad,” but he disagreed with the prosecution’s contention that EM was locked in his room for two years.
“That never happened,” Mittlestadt said.
But the father did tell investigators on videotape that his “skinny” son was so weak that he couldn’t even use a shovel to dig up cactus when they walked together in their yard.
Hatfield said Darrick testified that he and his wife talked about doing something to help EM, but they decided to do nothing because they feared what might happen to them if people saw what the boy looked like.
Instead, Hatfield said, the couple kept limiting their adopted son’s food intake, offering him just enough to keep him alive and never taking him in for medical treatment he desperately needed.
While Mittlestadt testified that he hadn’t seen EM for months – except for seeing “a blur” race from EM’s bedroom to his bathroom sometime in February — Hatfield noted he told Laramie County investigators in a videotaped interview before his arrest that he took a week off “to watch the boys” when Angela was training for a new job.
Hatfield also said EM’s behavior in the final months he lived with the family showed how deeply, both mentally and emotionally, the child had been hurt, and speculated that he’s going to spend the rest of his life trying to recover.
“Day after day, night after night. Not being fed. Not being shown love,” Hatfield said to the jury. “How will that affect his mind? That’s for you to judge.”
During his cross-examination of Mittlestadt on Wednesday, Hatfield mocked the defendant’s repeated statements that he wouldn’t discuss with Angela where she planned to take EM because of his behavioral problems, which included “peeing on himself,” smearing excrement on the walls and ripping his hair out — because he didn’t want to get into a fight with her.
“What did you think?” he asked Mittlestadt. “Did you think you were going to sprinkle fairy dust and [the issue] was going to magically disappear?”
