Tiona Rodriguez had a plan on Oct. 17, 2013.
The then-17-year-old had already completed the first part of her plot the day before: kill her newborn, according to the New York Daily News. The teenager left her family’s house in Brooklyn, New York, on Oct. 16 and arrived at her friend’s apartment, where she gave birth to an 8-pound baby in the bathroom.
“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,” prosecutor Rachel Ferrari said in court in 2015, according to the Daily News. “He wasn’t stillborn. He didn’t die of natural causes. He was murdered in that bathroom.”
Her second step in the plan was to “take this s–t and dig a hole, put it somewhere, lol,” she wrote in a Facebook message to a friend, according to the New York Post.
And the final part of the plan?
“then we go eat IHOP,” her Facebook message ended.
But Rodriguez never got to part two of that plan on Oct. 17. Instead, she decided to make a pit stop to go shopping at a Victoria’s Secret in Manhattan with her dead baby in a bag she was carrying, ABC7 reported.
A security guard at the shop thought Rodriguez was shoplifting $44.50 skinny jeans and stopped the teenager. That’s when the guard noticed that her bag reeked — and found her dead baby inside, Pix11 reported.
At first, Rodriguez’s lawyer Earl Ward argued in court that his client lost her child in a miscarriage, the Daily News reported.
But it was later determined that the baby died from “homicidal asphyxiation,” according to the New York County District Attorney’s Office. And more than four years after the dead infant was discovered in her bag, the DA’s office announced that Rodriguez pleaded guilty to one count of Manslaughter in the First Degree in the Manhattan Supreme Court.
“You admit the baby was born alive?” Judge Thomas Farber asked her in court, per the Post.
“Yes,” the Post wrote she admitted after a 10-second pause.
Her admission was part of a plea deal that gives her 16 years in prison, according to the Daily News.
“Tiona Rodriguez deliberately and intentionally killed her defenseless newborn child,” said District Attorney Cyrus Vance. “While today’s plea cannot bring back the life that was so abruptly ended, it is a just end to this tragedy.”
Sentencing for Rodriguez, who has another child, is planned for Feb. 6, the DA’s office wrote.
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