Seventeen months after a seven-months-pregnant Minneapolis woman was beaten to death inside a trailer later set ablaze, prosecutors said Monday at sentencings for the two responsible that not even the fire could erase her spirit.
The body of Annysa Marie Zierhut, 28, was discovered inside the burning trailer in Uptown on Nov. 8, 2021. She had been reported missing in Anoka about a week earlier but the missing person report quickly turned into a homicide investigation, culminating with sentencings for Jade Monet Rissell, 28, of Elk River, and Shannon Michael Benson, 43 of Minneapolis.
Their negotiated plea agreements for two counts each of second-degree murder amounted to 16½ years for Rissell and 28 for Benson. The punishments were handed down in back-to-back separate hearings in a Hennepin County District courtroom.
Rissell will serve fewer than 10 of those years behind bars given Minnesota's sentencing guidelines that require two-thirds of it be served in prison and the remaining third served on conditional release.
Zierhut's father, Robert Ost, said the sentences are "grossly inadequate and pathetic." They should be serving two consecutive life sentences, he said, for his daughter and unborn granddaughter Grace Marie — a name he gave her posthumously.
"If this is justice, then our system is broken and has failed Annysa, Grace and all of us. … I do know that typically people who commit these cowardly acts of violence on vulnerable pregnant women and children are not very well received," Ost said. "It seems that even people in prison may understand a better code of justice than our courts will allow."

Rissell was accused of killing Zierhut after luring her over Facebook to the trailer where she and Benson lived in the Whittier neighborhood. They moved the trailer — with Zierhut's body inside — to Uptown near S. Hennepin Avenue and W. 35th Street before lighting it on fire days after the murder.
Charges state that Rissell admitted to assaulting Zierhut with brass knuckles, knocking her unconscious and lighting the fire to hide her body.