Teen killed son then went shopping for lingerie with body in bag, prosecutors say
PUBLISHED : Friday, 31 July, 2015, 7:54am
UPDATED : Saturday, 01 August, 2015, 1:09pm
Associated Press in New York
Tiona Rodriguez and the Victoria's Secret store in Manhattan where a security guard made a gruesome discovery in her bag - the body of her infant son. Photos: Facebook
A teenage girl suffocated her just-born baby boy before putting his body in a shopping bag then going on a trip to a Victoria’s Secret store the next day, prosecutors said as she was charged with murder.
Tiona Rodriguez, now 18, pleaded not guilty, with her lawyer saying it was a stillbirth, not a killing.
The indictment on Thursday came nearly two years after Rodriguez was arrested on a US$45 shoplifting charge at the lingerie store, where a security guard found the body in a bag Rodriguez was carrying.
Prosecutors said their lengthy investigation filled out a picture of a girl who had already become a mother at 14 and was callously determined not to let anyone know she was having another baby.
“She knew she would be in big trouble if her family found out, so she made a plan — to kill this baby,” Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Rachel Ferrari said. “She had derailed her life once. She was not going to do it again.”
To carry out a plan formulated for weeks, the then 17-year-old Rodriguez went to a friend’s house October 16, 2013, and delivered in a bathroom, tore the 3.6kg boy’s umbilical cord with her hands and asphyxiated him, Ferrari said.
In a text message at some point, Rodriguez used a vulgarity to describe the baby and added she’d “dig a hole” and “put it somewhere” adding an “LOL” — online jargon for “laughing out loud” — and “then we go eat iHop,” the prosecutor said.
But defence lawyer Earl Ward said Rodriguez hadn’t realized she was pregnant, adding that her condition hadn’t been spotted during an annual primary-care checkup a month before the birth. While prosecutors said the baby was full-term, Ward said Rodriguez didn’t know how long she’d been pregnant.
Prosecutors said Rodriguez knew plenty about pregnancies and trying to conceal them.
After having her now 4-year-old son — a pregnancy unknown to her family until she went into labor — Rodriguez delivered again in 2012, Ferrari said. That child didn’t survive. Ferrari said the circumstances of the death are unclear, but that Rodriguez had texted her then-boyfriend about smashing or burning the body to disguise what it was. Ward said that baby also was stillborn.
Prosecutors said the latest baby lived at least a few minutes after being born in 2013. Ward suggested that air in the boy’s lungs could have been a byproduct of decomposing after death.
The shoplifting case was dismissed last year after prosecutors conceded that time had run out to try it.
