ARTESIA, N.M. (COURT TV/AP) — A New Mexico woman has been charged with first-degree murder in the January death of her newborn son, whose body authorities said she placed in a trash can.
Alexee Trevizo, 19, also was charged with tampering with evidence, according to a criminal complaint filed in Eddy County in southeastern New Mexico.
This May 11, 2023 booking photo provided by the Eddy County Detention Center shows Alexee Trevizo. (Eddy County Detention Center)
Trevizo went to the emergency room in late December for back pain, and lab tests showed she was pregnant and in labor, according to Artesia police. Trevizo then locked herself in a bathroom, where she gave birth to a boy Jan. 27, then placed the baby in a bag that she concealed under other trash, investigators said.
By the time the baby was found, the unnamed baby, identified in court documents as “Baby John Doe,” had died and Trevizo had left the hospital, investigators said. A postmortem examination by the medical investigator stated the cause of death as entrapment. According to the report, “entrapment occurs when an individual is in an airtight or relatively airtight container, in this case, a tied plastic trash bag, and consumes all of the available oxygen until there is no longer enough oxygen to sustain life.”
The report goes into more detail about how the baby was found inside the emergency room restroom.
“Cleaning staff at the hospital were cleaning up the blood in the restroom, when they removed the trash bag from the trashcan, they found the baby in a second trash bag, under the first, at the bottom of the trashcan with bloody paper towels. The trash bag he was found in was tied closed when it was found.”
Gary C. Mitchell, an attorney for Trevizo, said his client has no criminal record and should not be facing a murder charge.
He said there are “major discrepancies about what happened” in the hospital and “this isn’t a classic child abuse case.”
Trevizo was arrested May 11. Jail records show she was released May 16.
It’s the second recent, high-profile case involving a mother and a newborn baby in New Mexico.
Jurors convicted Alexis Avila, 19, of throwing her newborn into an outdoor trash receptacle in January 2020 in Hobbs, New Mexico. The child survived. Avila was sentenced May 1 to 16 years in prison.
