Mother’s Landlords Tell Court About Finding Baby in Toilet

Months after she found her roommate trying to flush a newborn baby boy down a toilet, an Oxnard woman testified Thursday, she asked the mother why she had done it.

“She never answered me,” Margarita Lima told a Ventura County Superior Court jury. “She would just keep quiet with her head down.”

And when Lima told the woman, Francisca Sanchez Jimenez, that such conduct could land her in jail, Jimenez was unfazed, Lima testified.

“She told me she wasn’t afraid,” Lima said.

Now Jimenez, 23, is on trial for the attempted murder of son Jose Luis, who survived, and for the murder of her second son, Baby Boy Sanchez, who did not.

Last July, 14 months after Lima rescued Jose Luis from the flush toilet, the tiny body of Baby Boy Sanchez was found at the bottom of a farm workers’ portable toilet where Jimenez allegedly left it seconds after giving birth.

Jimenez disappeared but was arrested a few months later.

The first incident was the subject of most of the testimony Thursday, as Lima and her husband, Adrian, told how they met Jimenez when she came from Tijuana, Mexico, to rent a room at their Oxnard house.

Margarita Lima said she soon suspected that Jimenez was pregnant, but the young farm worker always denied it.

“She would get annoyed on the occasions when I mentioned it to her,” Lima said, speaking in Spanish that was translated by a court interpreter.

One night in May, she said, Jimenez complained of pain in her lower back but did not want to see a doctor.

She got up twice during the night and stayed in bed the next morning instead of going to work.

Adrian Lima said he returned home about 10 a.m. and heard a baby crying and the toilet running as he walked past the downstairs bathroom.

He knocked on the door and heard Jimenez say the bathroom was occupied.

The door was apparently locked, he said, but he forced his way in.

“I saw a child, a baby, in the toilet bowl. It was crying and it was in the water moving around. The water was turning around and the child was going around like this,” he said, moving his hands in a circular motion.

Jimenez was standing against the door, trying to keep him out, he said.

There was blood on the floor.

Lima said he told his wife to look after the baby while he ran out to call for help.

When paramedics arrived to take the mother and baby to a hospital, Margarita Lima tried to persuade Jimenez to nurse her child.

“I told her to hug the baby and to forget the things that had happened,” Margarita Lima said. “She didn’t do it.”

Investigators have said Jimenez was not charged after the first incident because all of the circumstances did not come to light until later.

Assistant Public Defender Jean L. Farley has said the first incident was an accident.

When the second child was born, the illiterate and unsophisticated Jimenez thought that she had had a miscarriage, not a live birth, Farley said in opening remarks.

Testimony today is expected to focus on the second birth, which occurred when Jimenez was working in a Saticoy onion field. Several farm workers are scheduled to testify.