The autopsy report is chilling.
Two newborn babies — a boy and a girl — suffered multiple blunt force trauma injuries to the head, says the Brevard County Medical Examiner’s office. There was allegedly a “foreign object” in the mouth of one of the babies. The deaths of the babies, who were born healthy at 39 weeks, were classified as a homicide.
Police had previously arrested the twins’ 30-year-old mother, Rachael Lynn Thomas, and charged her with child neglect. On Wednesday, they upgraded the charges to two counts each of first-degree murder and aggravated child abuse, PEOPLE confirms.
According to the police report, Thomas called 911 on Sunday. “I had a baby, and then I passed out,” she told the dispatcher. “Now the baby’s not responding, and I don’t know what to do. It’s not doing anything. It’s cold and it’s blue.”
When first responders arrived, they found the baby boy cleaned and wrapped in a towel.
Later, however, they found the body of a second newborn, a girl, wrapped in a plastic bag and placed in a trash can. According to the police report, the girl’s umbilical cord was wrapped around her neck.
Thomas has also been charged with evidence tampering because she allegedly did not originally tell police about the baby girl.
Authorities immediately suspected that something was amiss. “There are suspicious circumstances involved,” the West Melbourne Police said in a statement after the grisly discovery.
West Melbourne Police Capt. Richard Cordeau described the nature of authorities’ suspicions to Clickorlando.com.
“The fact that there are two deceased infants — that’s not normal,” he told the outlet. “There could be a reasonable explanation for this and that’s part of the investigation, but there could not be a reasonable explanation.”
• Want to keep up with the latest crime coverage? Click here to get breaking crime news, ongoing trial coverage and details of intriguing unsolved cases in the True Crime Newsletter.
According to the police report, Thomas explained what happened when being questioned by deputies. She allegedly said that she had left her job at a discount store on Sunday morning because she wasn’t feeling well.
When she got home, she allegedly said, she gave birth in the bathroom. She claimed not to know that she had been pregnant, the report alleges.
Thomas waived her first appearance on Wednesday, which means that an automatic not guilty plea has been entered on her behalf, PEOPLE confirms. She will be arraigned next month.
She is being held in the Brevard County Jail without bond. It is unclear whether she has hired an attorney to represent her.
