MIAMI (Court TV) — A Florida woman pleaded guilty to trying to hire a hitman to kill her young child, but avoided jail time after working out a plea agreement with prosecutors.
Jazmin Paez pleaded guilty to all charges she faced on March 23, 2026. (Court TV)
Jazmin Paez, 20, pleaded guilty to felony charges of solicitation of first-degree murder, unlawful use of a communications device and tampering with or fabricating physical evidence at a hearing on Monday. She had previously pleaded not guilty to the same charges after her arrest in July 2023.
Paez was charged after reaching out to the website rentahitman.com with a “service request” for her son, who was then 3 years old. Assistant State Attorney Ayana Duncan said Monday that Paez was a teen mother and that the child in question may have been the result of an incestuous relationship; she said that Paez’s biological parents are both the maternal and paternal grandparents of the intended victim.
Duncan described Paez as “ill-equipped” to care of her child when she met another young teen and began a relationship without disclosing that her child existed. When Paez revealed the truth, she was dumped and “devastated,” prosecutors said. That young man “may have been the catalyst or impetus for even trying to carry out this plot,” Duncan said, “because essentially it was ‘Get rid of the child if you want me back.'”
Rentahitman.com is a parody website based in California; when its owners received the message from Paez, they passed it on to the police in Florida.
Paez agreed to plead guilty after her attorney negotiated an agreement with the state that resulted in her avoiding jail time in favor of probation. When Judge Carlos Gamez appeared to question that decision, Duncan pointed to Paez’s behavior while on pretrial release: during that time, the defendant graduated from high school and has nearly completed her associate degree in science. “There’s something to be said about that, and this is why we didn’t just throw an adjudication on her record judge,” Duncan said. Duncan noted that Paez’s defense had asked for a penalty of just youthful offender sanctions, “And the state said ‘No,’ because that wasn’t severe enough. So here’s the middle ground. You will get a withhold because maybe, just maybe, there might be a light at the end of the tunnel for this defendant.”
Paez will be under strict community control for two years, followed by 12 years of reporting probation. Special conditions of her sentence include receiving behavioral therapy, undergoing a mental health assessment and complying with any needed mental health treatment. Should she violate the terms of probation, she faces up to 40 years in state prison.
Paez’s parental rights were terminated for the minor child and she is not allowed to have any contact with them. She now lives with her biological father; the child lives with Paez’s mother, who has legally adopted it.
