A Brooklyn woman caught with a dead newborn in a shopping bag while allegedly shoplifting at a Victoria’s Secret in 2013 pleaded guilty to manslaughter on Thursday.
Tiona Rodriguez, now 21, made the confession as part of a plea deal for a reduced sentence of 16 years in prison. She was facing a life sentence on a second-degree murder charge.
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She admitted to putting the dead baby into a bag with the plan to bury it, but stopped first at the lingerie store in Manhattan.
According to police, she stole some clothes and shoved them into the same bag that carried her dead son. Security discovered the baby’s body after noticing a foul odor. Rodriguez was originally charged with second-degree murder in 2015.
“Tiona Rodriguez deliberately and intentionally killed her defenseless newborn child,”Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance said Thursday. “While today’s plea cannot bring back the life that was so abruptly ended, it is a just end to this tragedy.”
Rodriguez, then 17, texted after the killing that she wanted to “take this s— and dig a hole, put it somewhere, lol, then we go eat IHOP.”
Rodriguez also gave birth to another child who prosecutors say she may have killed. After having the baby in her bathtub in 2012 she texted her boyfriend, “It’s dead.”
It is not clear how that infant died.
Her lawyers said she hid that pregnancy from family because she had a 2-year-old boy and was frightened. That child is now 6.
