‘He deserves the max,’ mother tells judge sentencing her son’s killer

Overcome by tears, a mother on Friday addressed the man who severely beat her toddler son in 2018, causing his death three days later.

“Whatever you got coming, you got coming,” Natalie Miller told Antonio Bridges, her former boyfriend, at his sentencing hearing Friday morning. “Never did my baby deserve it. He was 15 months, not a teenager, not a preteen or a tough guy or anything.”

Bridges, 37, who appeared remotely from the Clark County Detention Center, declined to speak before his sentencing, only responding “Yes, ma’am” and “No, ma’am” when addressed by District Judge Michelle Leavitt.

Leavitt then sentenced him to serve 11 to 31 years years in state prison on one count of second-degree murder and one count of coercion. He got credit for 1,340 days already served in jail since his arrest.

Bridges was watching Mark Phillips Jr. on April 12, 2018, when he took him to University Medical Center and told a physician that the 1-year-old boy was breathing “funny,” Chief Deputy District Attorney Christopher Hamner said during his trial.

A medical examination at UMC — where his mother coincidentally was hospitalized at the time — showed that Mark had a fractured skull, brain bleeding and injuries to his liver, spleen and a lung.

The Metropolitan Police Department later recovered footage from a Las Vegas apartment complex that showed the boy “perfectly normal and healthy” shortly before being brought to the hospital, prosecutors said.

Three days later, Mark was dead from multiple blunt force injuries, said the Clark County coroner’s office, which ruled his death a homicide.

Authorities accused Bridges of hitting and kicking the boy and booked him on counts of first-degree murder and child abuse or neglect causing death.

Bridges agreed to an Alford plea on Sept. 1, which means he admitted only that there was enough evidence to prove his guilt at trial.

Under the agreement, prosecutors agreed to drop charges of battery by a prisoner and assault on an officer by a prisoner and possession of a dangerous weapon by an incarcerated person after Clark County jail officials found two shanks in his cell months after his arrest.

Bridges, a four-time felon in Georgia who had just moved to Las Vegas, was on parole for robbery at the time of the crime.

Bridges maintained his innocence in the boy’s death throughout his trial.

“I still believe 100 percent in his innocence,” Deputy Public Defender David Westbrook told the court in September. “He took the deal because he was scared, and I understand why he was scared.”

Westbrook did not offer additional comment Friday.

Mark’s mother, however, said her life was turned “upside down” by her son’s death. She said she still has nightmares and that to say she’s been depressed would be an “understatement.”

“I’m a woman of faith and I trust God,” she added.

Miller said her mother had asked her to lean on that faith to find forgiveness. She agreed that she will eventually need to, but said Friday was not the time for it.

“He deserves the max — life — life with no parole. I know it ain’t up to me, but that’s how I feel. He took an innocent child’s life. A child that belonged to God,” she told Leavitt.

Contact Ricardo Torres-Cortez at rtorres@reviewjournal.com. Follow him on Twitter @rickytwrites.