Mom pleads guilty to baby-shaking murder

JACKSONVILLE, Fla., Oct. 28 (UPI) -- A Florida mother pleaded guilty to second-degree murder for shaking her infant son to death because he cried while she was playing FarmVille on Facebook.

Alexandra V. Tobias, 22, said that after she first shook 3-month-old Dylan Lee Edmondson Jan. 20, she smoked a cigarette to calm herself down and then shook him again.

She said Dylan may have hit his head during the shaking.

Tobias entered her plea before state Circuit Judge Adrian G. Soud in Jacksonville.

A second-degree murder charge is punishable by up to life in prison, but prosecutor Richard Mantei said Tobias' sentence could be less because of state guidelines that call for 25- to 50-year sentences, The (Jacksonville) Florida Times-Union reported.

Soud gave no indication on what sentence he would order at Tobias's December sentencing.

FarmVille is a real-time farm simulation game developed by San Francisco's Zynga Inc. It is available as an application on Apple Inc.'s iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad and Google Inc.'s Android, as well as the social-networking Facebook Web site.

Zynga had no immediate comment on the death.

The Times-Union said Internet addiction was becoming "a very real crisis" and that games such as FarmVille are designed to be addictive to get players to spend real money on them.

Shaken baby syndrome, which is often fatal, occurs when an abuser violently shakes an infant or small child, creating whiplash-type acceleration-deceleration injuries.