‘I was a mother planning her baby’s funeral’: Livermore man gets 8 years for killing his daughter with fentanyl

DUBLIN — It was a court hearing with all the grief and mourning of a funeral, except that much of the focus was centered on a man seated toward the front of the room in a Santa Rita Jail jumpsuit.

Until late last year, 25-year-old Justin Pittman, of Livermore, was facing a murder charge for allegedly leaving fentanyl in a place where his 1-year-old daughter, Francesca Pittman, was able to ingest it and die. Last December, Pittman pleaded no contest to willful cruelty to a child with injury or death, accepting an eight-year prison sentence that can be reduced by half, court records show.

In jail since his arrest in 2022, Pittman has already served 75 percent of his sentence with good behavior credits factored in, court records show. Now, weeks after his Dec. 17, 2025 sentencing date, he remains jailed in Alameda County.

But his sentence wasn’t finalized until after Pittman had heard from family members of his daughter, from Francesca’s mother to the relative who was set to become her godmother just three days after Francesca’s death. They shared memories of Francesca, who they often referred to as “Frankie,” and their dashed hopes for her future. One relative spoke up for Pittman, stating that the tragedy has forced the young man to “confront his trauma, his mental health and his addiction in ways that he never had the opportunity or stability he had to face before.”

Francesca’s mother said in court she has been plunged into inescapable grief, a “crushing weight” felt every second of every day. Nearly three-and-a-half years later, she still wakes up in the morning and instinctively reaches for her little girl, she said.

“I grieve her laughter, her smile, her tiny hands, her warm weight in my arms. I grieve the milestones she will never reach. Her first words. Her first day of school. I grieve every birthday that will never be celebrated, every holiday that will forever feel empty, and every future moment that was stolen from her,” Francesca’s mother said in court. She added, “One moment, I was a mother with a living child; and the next, I was a mother planning her baby’s funeral.”

Francesca was declared dead Aug. 18, 2022 after being rush to a hospital from her home on the 200 block of Turnstone Drive in Livermore. Police say they were called there around 4:30 p.m. to a report of a large group of family members screaming outside the home that a young child was dead or dying, and attempting CPR.

Pittman and Francesca were taking a nap in his bed that afternoon. When his wife came home, she found Francesca unresponsive and showing obvious signs she was dead or dying. When police arrived, a family member told them they’d overheard Pittman telling paramedics to give his daughter naloxone, an opioid-overdose antidote, authorities said. When asked, he told officers he believed she had ingested fentanyl, and that he’d used the drug two days earlier, police said at the time.

“The thing (Pittman) loved the most was fentanyl and decided to put a disgusting drug before his own daughter,” one friend of the family told the court. “Because of him, we are sitting in this courtroom today.”

Pittman didn’t speak in court, but his aunt did. She told everyone there that Pittman had lost a brother to fentanyl months earlier, and he was “drowning in grief and addiction” at the time. The years spent in jail since then have brought something new to Pittman’s life — sobriety, she said.

“None of this excuses what happened. (Pittman) knows that. He has never tried to deny responsibility,” his aunt said in court. “From day one, he has carried overwhelming remorse as a father, a son, a brother and a human being. He wakes up every day knowing that consequences of his addiction took the life of the person he loved the most.”