Brooke Seal is sentenced in Outagamie County court, March 24, 2025. PC: Fox 11 Online
APPLETON, WI (WTAQ-WLUK) – Brooke Seal was sentenced to nine years in prison Monday in connection with the drug overdose death of her 2-year-old daughter.
She was also placed on extended supervision for eight years by Judge Carrie Schneider.
Additionally, Seal was convicted for smuggling drugs into the Outagamie County Jail, but that sentence is concurrent to the child neglect case.
Rosalie Garcia died at a Freedom apartment in January 2024 after being exposed to fentanyl. Seal, 29, was convicted of child neglect-consequence is death for allowing a drug dealer, Faheem Jones, to stay in her apartment.
Before the sentence was issued, Seal tearfully apologized. Noting her addiction, she said she failed her daughter, her family and herself.
“Your honor, I am capable of success. And I am capable of long-term sobriety. Today, I am asking you to give me another opportunity to show my strength and my dedication to change,” she said.
Judge Schneider noted Seal’s previous drug convictions, and she said this case illustrates the danger of drugs in the community and in homes. The judge also lamented the unknown loss created by the toddler’s death.
“And I know, Ms. Seal, in some ways you will carry this weight more than others, even in this room. You were Rosalie’s mother. But in a different way, it has impacted all of them, because we don’t know who she would have became, what she would have turned out to be in our community. And, tragically, some of her birthday gifts were probably left still unused, because it was not even a week after her birthday, or thereabouts,” the judge said.
The complaint describes Seal’s offense as “through her failure to take action, for reasons other than poverty, did negligently fail to provide protection from exposure to the distribution or manufacture of controlled substances… so as to seriously endanger the physical, mental, or emotional health of the child, and the child suffered death as a consequence.”
Jones was charged with seven counts, including fentanyl possession, as part of the investigation, but he has not been charged in direct connection with Garcia’s death. No trial date has been set. He returns to court April 4.
According to the criminal complaint, Jones told police he was at the building to do laundry. In the laundry room, police found a backpack with a stolen gun, ammunition and a plastic bag with 1,414 pills which tested positive for fentanyl.
Seal’s phone also contained messages showing she was trying to buy fentanyl from Jones less than 10 hours before Garcia died, according to the complaint.
After her arrest for the child’s death, she was taken to the Outagamie County Jail on Jan. 31, 2024. On Feb. 5, the sheriff’s department began investigating an incident from the previous weekend, where a syringe was found in a holding cell. The material inside tested positive for fentanyl and methamphetamines, according to the criminal complaint.
Surveillance video captured Seal “reaching down behind the cell toilet, in the same location the syringe was later located,” the complaint states.
During the investigation, officials reviewed the body scans from when she was booked into the jail, and one done as part of the investigation, determining she used a body cavity to get the syringe into the jail.
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