MARIETTA - A sobbing Janette L. Eason, 46, of Dallas begged for forgiveness Tuesday morning after admitting she was so drunk on the morning of June 8, 2008, that she crashed her truck into a Powder Springs house and killed a sleeping child.

Eason, who has been in in Cobb County Jail since her arrest, was sentenced to a total of 15 years by Cobb Superior Court Judge C. LaTain Kell. She was ordered to spend at least 12 years in prison and her time already served will count. She now will serve 10 more years behind bars followed by three years of probation. Her blood-alcohol level at the time of the accident was 0.19, more than two times the legal amount of 0.08, and she had two previous DUI convictions.

"I want you to know how sorry I am," Eason told the family of Elliot Savary, 14. "That every day for the rest of my life, I will remember you and your son and your daughter ... I am a good person. I'm not the old person that I was, and I am so sorry, please forgive me."

The Savary family - father Linley, mother Raina and sister Leah, 15 - grieved quietly during the hearing. Elliot Savary, described by teachers and friends as bright and loveable, had just completed eighth grade at Tapp Middle School.

"I can still remember it like it was yesterday," Linley Savary said. "The helplessness that I felt that morning, being unable to help my children, and then the blank expression on Ms. Eason's face - when she looked at me all she could say was, 'sorry,' because she was so inebriated that she had no idea what she had done."

It was about 3 a.m. that Sunday morning when Eason crashed her maroon, 2007 Ford F-250 pickup truck through several residential lawns and then into the Savary home on Legend Hollow Lane.

The truck plowed through the home's garage and front foyer and into Elliot's bedroom. The truck pushed him and the contents of his room through the wall and into the bedroom of Leah Savary, before continuing out the other end of the house.

Leah was pinned between the front bumper and one of the interior walls of the house for several hours, and then was treated at a hospital. Elliot died at the scene.

"We now live a new normal life, each day, every moment, overshadowed by the tragedy of that morning," Linley Savary told Eason, who also has a son. "Your sentencing today doesn't give us closure or satisfaction, because our son is still dead. There is no just sentence that will compensate us for the life of our son."

"You will still be able to laugh, hold, touch and speak with your loved ones during and after your incarceration. But we will no longer have that luxury with our son. While we are brokenhearted for the loss of our son, forgiveness is yours," Linley Savary said.

Before granting the prosecutor's request for the maximum sentence, Cobb Superior Court Judge Kell told Eason, "I guess the only two things that I've seen today that give me some comfort in all of this ... I do sense true and profound remorse in you that I don't always see in cases. But the second basic thing I see in this case and I have seen in other cases, and it astounds me, is the capacity of this family to forgive and to try to go on in their lives."

In the hours before the crash, Eason had reportedly been drinking at a friend's house nearby in Powder Springs when she got in an argument with her husband, David, who tried to stop her from driving away.

David Eason was not in the courtroom Tuesday.

Noted defense lawyer Jimmy Berry, whom the Easons hired shortly after the crash, said David Eason visits and speaks to his wife regularly, but did not want to attend the hearing because of the media attention.

After the hearing, Linley Savary said that his family forgives Eason because it is the only way they can move on with their lives.

"It didn't do us any good to hold any kind of hate," he said. "We had to say 'We forgive you.' We have to continue living. We have to continue moving forward."