Teen mom who carried dead baby in Victoria’s Secret bag is charged with murder

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Thursday, a teen mom caught with a dead newborn stuffed in a shopping bag, while allegedly shoplifting at Victoria’s Secret, was charged with murdering the baby boy.

Prosecutor Rachel Ferrari alleges that in October 2013, Tiona Rodriguez, 18, “carried out the murder of her newborn infant and then callously shoved him in a bag with the plan of — in her words — to ‘take this s— and dig a hole, put it somewhere, lol, then we go eat IHOP.’”

Ferrari quoted the nonchalant text message from Rodriguez during the teen’s arraignment on a second-degree murder charge.

Rodriguez was initially charged with shoplifting a $44.50 pair of skinny jeans from the Herald Square store. However, when security searched her bag, they made a gruesome discovery and found the dead newborn amongst her belongings.

According to Ferrari,

[Rodriguez] became pregnant in early 2013 and told no one. She knew she would be in big trouble if her family found out. So, she made a plan to kill this baby. [She] began plotting weeks before he was born.

She took steps to get ready, and on October 16, 2013, she woke up and knew that this was the day. She contacted a friend and went to her home in Queens, away from the prying eyes of her friends, her family, her community in Brooklyn.

She took a bag with her, and a change of clothes. And she went into her friend’s bathroom, turned on the tub, and gave birth to her baby. Ripping the cord with her bare hands.

Rodriguez’s baby weighed 8 pounds and was full term.

“He wasn’t stillborn. He didn’t die of natural causes. He was murdered in that bathroom,” the prosecutor maintains. The child’s death was ruled a homicide by the medical examiner’s office last year. An autopsy concluded he died as a result of homicidal asphyxia.

The victim, known only as “Baby Boy Rodriguez,” was laid to rest earlier this year.