Body cam footage shows the tragic moment when medical staff, police, and her mother confront a 19-year-old patient for allegedly hiding her dead newborn son in a trash bag.
“We discovered a dead baby in the bathroom,” the doctor said.
The defendant, Alexee Trevizo, said the baby came out of her, and she did not know what to do.
“Lexee, I told you about this,” her mother said. “I just asked you, baby, to tell me the truth.”
Trevizo said she was scared. She told everyone the baby was not crying.
As previously reported, cops in Artesia, New Mexico, said that Trevizo went to a hospital for lower back pain. But a custodian cleaned up a restroom after the defendant used it. Noticing that the trash bag was heavier than usual, she checked and discovered the newborn.
At the beginning of the released body cam footage, a nurse told responding officers that Trevizo had a positive pregnancy test and denied having sex. She said she had to go to the bathroom and was in there for quite a while, he said. They got her to open the restroom and discovered “blood and sh–” everywhere, he said.
She had been cleaning it up. They took her back to her hospital room. The nurse said that he feared that she had done something to herself at the time. But then he discovered the newborn in the trash can.
“She killed the kid,” he said.
He described the newborn as full-term. Trevizo’s mother was shocked when the nurse told her about the baby’s status as a full-term birth.
“Lexee, have you watched the news of the girls — what they do to their babies, and they go to jail?” the mother said.
Just weeks ago, another teen mother in New Mexico was convicted of attempted murder for placing her newborn son inside a plastic bag and discarding the baby in a dumpster. In that case, the defendant told investigators she didn’t know what to do and panicked after learning a day earlier that she was pregnant.
Trevizo’s mother left, saying she had to call her husband, but she immediately returned to press her daughter on where she put the baby.
Trevizo said she put the baby in a bag.
An officer in the video told the mother to give her time and that Trevizo will speak to detectives.
As seen on video footage, authorities eventually flew the defendant out after the doctor said the 19-year-old was still bleeding significantly and had not delivered the placenta.
“Artesia Police Department detectives presented case information to the 5th Judicial District Attorney’s Office on March 28, 2023. A criminal complaint was approved on May 10, 2023, and formal charges were filed on the suspect and mother of the victim,” cops said.
Authorities did not release the baby’s name, only calling him the placeholder John Doe.
As police phrased it, Trevizo is charged with first-degree murder “or alternatively” intentional abuse of a child resulting in death, plus a count for tampering with evidence.