[chris]

A Layton, Utah, mother was sentenced last week to two concurrent terms of 15 years to life in prison for strangling her two young children in 2010, ending a case that spent nearly 15 years stalled by questions about her mental competency.

Sun Cha Warhola, 60, pleaded guilty in June 2024 to two counts of first-degree felony murder in the deaths of 8-year-old James Warhola and 7-year-old Jean Marie Warhola. Judge Michael Edwards imposed the sentence on June 30, 2025, in 2nd District Court in Farmington, according to the Standard-Examiner. Warhola asked at the hearing to be allowed to return to her native country.

The children died on Sept. 8, 2010, at the family's home on Snoqualmie Circle. According to charging documents, their father, Kenneth Warhola, came home from work that evening to find the bedroom doors closed and blocked from inside. His wife told him to give her 10 minutes before coming in. When he forced open the door to his son's room a short time later, he found the two children on a bed under a blanket and touched his son's face, which was cold.

Unable to find the house phone, Warhola ran to a neighbor's home and called 911. In the recording, which police released in October 2010, he told the dispatcher he believed his wife had done something to the children and that they felt cold. Asked whether they were breathing, he said he did not think so. Officers reached the home about an hour after the call.

Investigators found distinct ligature marks on both children's necks consistent with strangulation, according to Deseret News. Prosecutors said the children and their mother had defensive wounds on their arms and legs, an indication the two had struggled. Warhola was charged in 2010 with two counts of aggravated murder, a capital offense.

The prosecution stretched across more than a decade. Warhola was found not competent to stand trial in 2011 and committed to the Utah State Hospital, then moved through repeated competency evaluations in the years that followed, according to KSL. Trial dates were set and canceled, and the case slowed further during the COVID-19 pandemic before she entered her plea in 2024.

Kenneth Warhola told reporters during the long wait that he feared his children would be forgotten. "I kind of get the feeling that as time goes on, there's a way the story could be forgotten," he told KSL in 2019.