Woman to Stand Trial in Baby’s Toilet Death : Crime: A farm worker is accused of murder and attempted murder involving two newborn boys.

A 22-year-old Ventura County farm worker accused of twice dropping her infants into toilets, killing one and causing brain damage to another, was ordered Thursday to stand trial for murder and attempted murder.

Francisca Maria Jimenez Sanchez is scheduled to be arraigned on those charges Nov. 27 in Ventura County Superior Court.

Municipal Judge John R. Smiley ordered Sanchez held for trial after a 2 1/2-day preliminary hearing.

Witnesses testified during the hearing that they found Sanchez’s most recent newborn son suffocated in a portable chemical toilet in a Saticoy onion field on July 28, and that she tried to flush another newborn boy down the toilet of her Oxnard house in May, 1990.

Both times before giving birth, Sanchez repeatedly denied that she was pregnant, her co-workers testified.

“Anybody would notice it,” testified Jose Ibanez Gonzalez, who ferried Sanchez daily in his car to and from the fields where they picked green onions last summer.

“I could see that she was a little plump,” he said. “I would ask her, but she wouldn’t tell me she was pregnant.”

But on July 28, Sanchez complained of a stomachache and entered a chemical toilet mounted on a trailer near the field, co-workers testified. She emerged later with a sweater tied around her waist and blood on her shoes, and asked Gonzalez to drive her home, he testified.

The baby lived and breathed for more than a minute before smothering in the toilet’s sump of feces and chemicals, testified Dr. F. Warren Lovell, the Ventura County coroner.

The body was found two days later by sanitation worker Roy Lezado and buried in Ventura beneath a headstone donated by well-wishers and inscribed only with the words “Baby Boy Sanchez.”

During the following week, anonymous callers left toys and flowers on the grave. One left a single rose with a card attached, reading, “To Baby Boy Sanchez: God will love you like your mother who couldn’t.”

Sanchez’s other child is in a foster care home, where he was placed after a May 11, 1990, incident that left him brain-damaged.

Sanchez’s housemates testified that she repeatedly refused to admit that she was pregnant, although she was gaining weight and complaining of lower back pain.

Then came a day when they forced open the bathroom door to find the newborn boy spinning around headfirst in the toilet as Sanchez held down the flush-handle, housemate Adrian Camilo Lima testified.

“I (was) still able to see Francisca put down the handle of the toilet and push the baby down, so I went in and pushed her and I took the baby,” testified Lima’s wife, Margarita Lima Vega.

Vega said she tied off the child’s umbilical cord with a hair ribbon and took him upstairs to safety while her husband rushed to a neighbor’s phone and summoned help.

The paramedics arrived and put Sanchez onto a gurney, but when police tried to hand her the baby, “she put her hands down,” Vega testified. “She wouldn’t hold him.”

Vega testified that she asked Sanchez whether she was worried about going to jail. She said Sanchez replied: “I’m not afraid of jail. Jail cannot eat me.”

Child welfare authorities took the baby away from her four months later after she was accused of abusing him, Deputy Dist. Atty. Carol Nelson said.

Sanchez hung her head throughout the hearing, her hands sometimes fidgeting on her lap.

She is being held in lieu of $250,000 bail at Ventura County Jail in Ventura. If convicted, she faces a maximum sentence of life in prison.