Teen mum faces death penalty murder charge for throwing newborn son in dumpster
A teenager who threw her newborn son into a trash compactor after giving birth in secret now faces the death penalty having been charged with murder.
Jakayla Williams, 18, later told detectives she ‘didn’t want a child’ because having a baby ‘cost too much money’, Will Benny, police chief in Dothan, Alabama, told reporters.
He said her family only learned she had given birth last week, with a concerned relative then accompanying her to a nearby hospital where she claimed to have left him with an employee.
But staff at the Southeast Health Medical Center called police when a review of the facility’s CCTV showed no sign of her ever having been there.
The police chief said it was determined that she had actually had a baby a week earlier, at around 7.30am on August 13.
‘Somewhere around 10am or 11am she went to an apartment complex on the west side of Dothan and placed a live newborn in a trash compactor,’ he added.
He said officers later found the baby’s remains still in the unemptied dumpster at a landfill site, wrapped in a mattress protector inside a zipped duffel bag.
She has now been charged with capital murder.
After composing himself, Mr Benny said: ‘I have never even heard of something so horrific as this. It shocks the mind, it shocks the soul.
‘I don’t even really know what else to say about it.’
Tragically, he added that had Williams actually gone to the hospital they would have accepted the infant under the state’s ‘no questions asked’ policy.
Alabama is one of two dozen states where abortion has been either banned or restricted, with individuals currently prosecuted for simply helping pregnant women cross state borders for one.
Russ Goodman, Dothan’s district attorney, said discussions are still underway as to whether prosecutors will seek the death penalty.
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