MANHATTAN — A mother caught shopping at a Victoria Secret in Manhattan with her dead newborn baby in a bag has been sentenced, the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office said Friday.
Tiona Rodriguez was sentenced Thursday to 16 years after pleading guilty to manslaughter in January, the District Attorney’s Office stated.
The mother was a teenager in 2013 when she was stopped by security, who suspected of shoplifting a pair of skinny jeans worth $44.50 at a Victoria’s Secret in Herald Square.
That’s when security said they noticed a foul odor.
Rodriguez deliberately killed her newborn child after delivering the baby in the bathroom of her friend’s apartment in Queens, DA Cyrus Vance said in January. Her son weighed about 8 pounds at birth.
The medical examiner later ruled the infant’s death was caused by homicidal asphyxiation.
The baby was not her first child. She’d had a son when she was 14. Her family didn’t know about that pregnancy until she went into labor. Then she delivered again in 2012. That child didn’t survive.
