2 Incidents Hurt Mother’s Case, Prosecutor Says

If it had happened only once, it would be a lot easier to believe Francisca Sanchez Jimenez’s account of the birth and death of her baby in a portable toilet last July, a prosecutor said Tuesday.

If it were a one-time occurrence, Deputy Dist. Atty. Carol J. Nelson said, it would not be so implausible that a woman could go into a bathroom, unaware that she was about to give birth; that the baby could pop out of the womb within seconds, and that the umbilical cord would break, causing the infant to fall into the toilet.

But Jimenez, on trial in Ventura County Superior Court, is not just accused of the murder of Baby Boy Sanchez, her newborn son who asphyxiated in the wastes and chemicals of the portable toilet. She also is charged with attempted murder of her firstborn son, who was rescued from a flush toilet at an Oxnard residence 14 months earlier.

“How weird that this same woman would twice have babies and twice the umbilical cords would break and both times they ended up in sanitary facilities,” Nelson said. “You might buy it once, but you just can’t buy it twice.”

The only logical explanation, Nelson said, is that Jimenez twice had unwanted babies and twice tried to use toilets to get rid of them.

But in her closing statement to the jury, which begins deliberations today, Assistant Public Defender Jean L. Farley insisted that Nelson had failed to prove Jimenez guilty of either charge beyond a reasonable doubt.

In the first case, Farley said, Jimenez gave birth in the bathroom of the residence where she was living. The baby fell into the toilet and the defendant, overcome with fatigue, was unable to rescue the child before her roommates rushed in and plucked him from the bowl. After recovering, Jimenez wanted the baby so badly that she took parenting classes and psychological tests to satisfy officials that she was a suitable mother, Farley said.

Nelson, however, cited testimony that when the roommates entered, Jimenez was flushing the toilet with one hand and using the other to push the infant headfirst down the toilet. And afterward, the prosecutor said, Jimenez took little interest in feeding or caring for the child, as evidenced by a day-care worker who said the infant was always hungry.

Farley said the second baby came so rapidly that Jimenez did not realize that she had given birth or that the infant had fallen into the toilet. She disputed the county medical examiner’s testimony that the baby apparently breathed for as much as 60 seconds and probably cried before dying.

But Nelson said that after having the first baby in May, 1990, Jimenez must have known what was happening to her body last July 28, when she walked into the portable toilet set up in an onion field where she was working.

“There’s no doubt in the world she knew when she went into that bathroom that she was going to have a baby,” Nelson said. Dozens of farm workers could have helped her, the prosecutor added.

“She didn’t tell them because she didn’t plan to keep the baby,” Nelson said. “She planned to kill the baby.”

Nelson also challenged Jimenez’s claim that the umbilical cord--which connects a fetus with its mother--simply broke during both deliveries. She said the county medical examiner had testified to the unlikelihood of such a tear.

“Far more reasonable . . . is that the defendant just bit the cord,” Nelson said, adding that the roommates had testified to seeing blood on Jimenez’s face after the first birth.

Defense psychologists described Jimenez as an illiterate product of a remote Mexican village who was never taught the basics of human reproduction.

Farley insisted that her client communicates at the level of an 8-year-old and should not be convicted of murder simply because she is ignorant.