UPDATE: Casey Anthony breaks down in tears during closing arguments

Associated Press

ORLANDO, Fla.

Casey Anthony briefly broke down crying Sunday as prosecutors told jurors during closing arguments that she murdered her 2-year-old daughter Caylee because the child prevented her from having a relationship with a club promoter.

Prosecutor Jeff Ashton said Anthony wanted a relationship with her boyfriend, to go out with her friends and to live the carefree life she had lived before Caylee’s birth.

“Something needed to be sacrificed, that something was either the life she wanted or the life thrust upon her. She chose to sacrifice her child,” Ashton said during his 90-minute argument.

Prosecutors contend Caylee was suffocated with duct tape by a mother who then crafted elaborate lies to mislead everyone from investigators to her own parents. Defense attorneys countered that the toddler accidentally drowned in the family swimming pool, and that her seemingly carefree mother in fact was hiding emotional distress caused by alleged sexual abuse from her father.

As Ashton spoke, Anthony appeared mostly stone-faced for about the first 45 minutes, but then she closed her eyes and rested her chin on her hand. She began to cry when Ashton said that the story that Caylee drowned was also false.

Ashton said the proof that Caylee’s death wasn’t an accident was that three pieces of duct tape were placed on her face — one on the mouth, one on the nose and one over those to be “thorough.”

The defense will give its closing argument later Sunday, and then the jury will begin deliberating. Casey Anthony was born in Warren in 1986 to George and Cindy Anthony, who lived in Howland before moving the family to Florida in 1989.

Watch for updates today on Vindy.com, and read the full story Monday in The Vindicator and on Vindy.com.