YOUNGSTOWN — According to the details a 67-year-old Boardman woman gave about being attacked and traumatized in her home by a young woman a year ago and the accounts of how the young woman being abused and neglected while growing up are true, both women need care, court officials said.

But when a hearing in Mahoning County Common Pleas Court ended Tuesday, the young woman, Destaney Phillips, 26, was sentenced to six more years in prison with a suggestion from Judge John Durkin that Phillips seek help for substance abuse when she leaves prison.

Phillips was indicted on aggravated burglary, aggravated robbery, felonious assault and specifications that could have put her in prison for 30 years or more if convicted. But assistant Prosecutor Nick Brevetta reached a plea deal with Phillips in June, reducing her charges to lower-level felonies and recommended Phillips get 7 1/2 years in prison.

Brevetta said the victim suffered lacerations and bruises to her neck, back arm and hands, but no broken bones in the July 18, 2020, attack by Phillips.

Boardman police said Phillips knocked on the victim’s door and asked for help because she was pregnant, hot and thirsty and needed to charge her cellphone. Then she assaulted the woman.

Phillips pulled a cellphone cord around the victim’s neck and threatened to kill her, saying, “‘Give me all your money. I have a gun and I will kill you,’ as she pulls the cord tighter around my throat,” the older woman described in her statement to the judge.

“Reliving that whole struggle to save myself, feeling that knife being put to my ear and on my throat … I was scared … I wasn’t going to live,” the woman said. “I moved out of town to live with my family, where I feel safe and taken care of.”

Nonetheless, “I am trapped inside myself with fear and anxiety stopping me from living my life,” the victim said. “Every time someone knocks on the door or rings the bell, I panic. I don’t think I will ever get over this.”

When Phillips’ attorney, Lynn Maro, spoke to Durkin later, she said her client tells a different story — that Phillips had been helping the victim for months because the victim has mental health issues. “She would run errands for her. She would go shopping for her,” Maro said.

Phillips admits to not having returned the victim’s debit card and credit cards and “something happened,” but Maro questioned the validity of some of what the victim said. For instance, Boardman police reports do not mention any gun or threat of a gun, Maro said.

Maro said Phillips has a substance-abuse problem and was previously imprisoned but got no real help for her problems in prison.

Maro said Phillips’ parents both had drug problems, her father was incarcerated while she was young, “her mom continued to choose drugs and other men over her children. At a very young age, she moved out of her mom’s home and was living with her sister. Her sister was killed in an automobile accident, and that forced her in 2009 to move back in with her mom, a very volatile drug-infested home with men that were coming and going. And in 2011, her mom passed away.”

Maro said she believes Phillips, who delivered a baby while in jail awaiting trial in this case, could change her life because of that child. “Her overwhelming desire to give a different life to her child is enough to change her path,” Maro said.

Durkin, who runs the common pleas drug court, said he knows that prison does not provide many opportunities for people with substance abuse issues to get better. But he said he hopes Phillips will take advantage of opportunities after she leaves prison, despite the hard times she has experienced.

“I’m certain that much of your (substance) use has been the result of trying to hide the pain,” he said.

But the type of crime Phillips committed shows the need for prison, he said. Phillips received a three-year prison sentence in 2018 after pleading guilty in Mahoning County Common Pleas Court to complicity to aggravated robbery, according to court records.

The judge said the fact that Phillips got into the victim’s house “whether it was the first time you were there or the 10th, it resulted in obviously significant emotional — some physical — injury.”