The shoplifting teen mother caught with a dead newborn in a shopping bag at Victoria’s Secret in 2013, has pleaded guilty to manslaughter
A teen mother who was caught with a dead newborn boy in a shopping bag as she was shoplifting at Victoria’s Secret in 2013, has pleaded guilty to manslaughter.
Tiona Rodriguez from Brooklyn, now 21 but who was 18 at the time, put the dead baby into a bag with the plan to bury it in a hole then go and eat at I-Hop.
The teen was on her way to ditch the newborn when she decided to make a stop at the lingerie store in Manhattan.
She ended up stealing some clothes and shoved them into the same bag that carried her dead son.
Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance said 21-year-old Rodriguez deliberately killed her newborn child after delivering the baby in the bathroom of her friend’s apartment in Queens. Her son weighed about 8 pounds at birth.
‘Tiona Rodriguez deliberately and intentionally killed her defenseless newborn child,’ said District Attorney Vance. ‘While today’s plea cannot bring back the life that was so abruptly ended, it is a just end to this tragedy.’
The teen became pregnant in early 2013 but told no one.
She thought she would be in trouble if her family found out and so made a plan to kill the baby, plotting weeks before he was born according to the Daily News.
As she took steps to get ready, on October 16, 2013, she woke and went to a friends home in Queens, away from the prying eyes of her friends, family, and community in Brooklyn.
Widget not in any sidebars
She took a bag with her, and a change of clothes. And she went into her friend’s bathroom, turned on the tub, and gave birth to her baby. Ripping the cord with her bare hands.
‘He wasn’t stillborn, he didn’t die of natural causes. He was murdered in that bathroom,’ the prosecutor said.
The medical examiner later ruled the infant’s death was caused by homicidal asphyxiation.
She cleaned up after herself, leaving no sign of what transpired in the bathroom, taking her child out in a bag.
Rodriguez sent a text after the killing saying she wanted to ‘take this s— and dig a hole, put it somewhere, lol, then we go eat IHOP,’ prosecutors said.
The district attorney also revealed that Rodriguez gave birth to a baby in her bathtub in 2012. Afterward she texted her boyfriend, ‘It’s dead.’
Rodriguez was not a panicked teenager and ‘knew what she was doing’ having been pregnant twice before.
‘When the defendant was 14, she successfully hid her first pregnancy, and it was only when she was in the hospital in labor that her own family became aware that she was even pregnant,’ the prosecutor said.
The child she had when she was 14 is now six-years-old while her second child didn’t survive.
Rodriguez is expected to be sentenced February 6.