WARREN, Ohio - Bresha Meadows isn't going home, but she's headed to the place her attorneys and Trumbull County prosecutors agree she belongs: Bellefaire JCB, a treatment facility in Cleveland.

Charged with aggravated murder in July 2016 for shooting dad Jonathan Meadows in the head as he slept, the 15-year-old has been at the center of a media storm ever since. Her case has drawn supporters from all over the globe who believe the girl acted to save herself and her family from an abusive tyrant and the outcry of her father's siblings, who say their brother is not only a murder victim, but the victim of character assassination.

At a tense and emotional hearing in Trumbull County Juvenile Court Monday, prosecutor Stanley Elkins amended the charges to involuntary manslaughter, a third-degree felony. Bresha, her hair in braids and gathered into a puffy topknot, answered "true" to those charges, the language used by those adjudicated in juvenile court.

She will stay in the juvenile detention facility in Warren, where Judge Pamela A. Rintala says she has been a model prisoner, until July 29, a date that marks a year and a day of incarceration for the crime, then be transferred to Bellefaire for a six-month term of inpatient treatment. After that, if her doctors and the court agree, she'll be released to her family on probation.

Judge Rintala said that without a full airing of the evidence, she couldn't know what motivated the girl to pull the trigger, adding, "I am very sorry for you if the adults in your life failed you - that's a horrible situation for any child."

For many, the case has exposed holes in a government safety net designed to protect kids like Bresha and her mother, Brandi Meadows, and has divided a family. This was no starker than after Bresha's sentencing.

While both the defense and prosecution said they believed "the best interests of the child" had been met by the plea deal, not everyone agreed.

"It is not a good feeling to know that someone is getting away with murder," said Lena Cooper, who has staunchly defended the name of her brother throughout the proceedings.

"Bresha Meadows is a domestic violence survivor," countered Brandi's sister Martina Latessa, who has always stood in Bresha's corner. "She is not a cold calculating killer."

Inside the courtroom, Cooper told the judge she would have welcomed a trial, and, in a stunning move, implicated others in her brother's death.

"We . . .honestly do not believe that our niece acted alone," Cooper said, although she accused no one by name. "It's very hard for us to accept the deal . . . it's devastating.

"My brother was a good man. He did not abuse his family. He did not abuse those children."

As her aunt spoke, Bresha wept, wiping away her tears with the sleeve of her navy prison uniform.

Bresha's attorney, Cleveland's Ian Friedman, called upon Dr. Kathleen M. Heide, a criminologist at the University of South Florida, to explain the shooting.

Heide has identified four types of kids who kill their parents: the severely abused, the severely mentally ill, the dangerously anti-social and the enraged.

After reviewing the voluminous Bresha Meadows' file - including "more than 250 pages" of medical records detailing decades of injury to Bresha's mom - and speaking to Bresha earlier this month, Heide concluded that Bresha wasn't "psychotic." She wasn't angry because her father grounded her or wouldn't let her date a certain boy either.

"Bresha meets the characteristics of the severely abused child," Heide said, someone who kills not in retribution but out of "desperation and terror" to protect herself or others.

Heide identified a pattern of "longstanding" "severe" family violence and drug and alcohol abuse in the home, a mother who could not protect her children, Bresha's cries for help that went unanswered and her vain attempts to escape. Bresha, she said, had also told a friend her father had sexually abused her.

The allegation elicited a sharp objection from prosecutor Elkins - who said he would have rebutted Heide's opinions had they been shared at trial - and later, a furious denial from Cooper.

Following Heide's statements, Friedman shared the reason he had taken up Bresha's defense. He met her two days after the killing.

"Mr. Ian . . . Is my Daddy dead?" she asked. She'd seen the reports on TV that said he'd been taken to the hospital. When he told her "yes," she asked him another.

" 'Do you think that it would be weird if I wanted to go to his funeral? I love my Daddy for bringing me onto this Earth. And I hate my Daddy for what he did to me and my mommy.' "

That's when he decided he couldn't walk away.

"She lived a life . . . no human being should ever have to endure," said Friedman. ". . . This is a good child." Bresha sat beside him, silently crying.

Story updated at 8:15 p.m.