UPDATE: Orange County District Attorney lays out the charges against young mother on eve of her arraignment (details at end of post) . . .
A young mother who told her parents she was not feeling well was taken to a local hospital, where doctors determined she had just given birth.
That was news to the folks.
Hospital staff called police. Officers searched the Fullerton home where the new mom lived with her parents. A dead baby was found in her bedroom.
No, this is not a reprint of the recent post on Yanira Valderrama, the 20-year-old Fullerton woman sitting in a jail cell facing murder for allegedly concealing her pregnancy from her parents, secretly giving birth to a newborn boy, drowning him in the toilet, wrapping him in a t-shirt and discarding him in a bedroom trashcan.
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For one thing, the latest case involves an 18-year-old mother and her newborn girl.
For another, this newborn was stabbed to death before
being hidden in the West
Fullerton home.
Yoselin Torres Tovar, who had been placed on protective watch pending an autopsy, was arrested today in her baby girl's death.
The child was born around 3 a.m. Sunday.
UPDATE:
April 22, 2010
TEEN MOTHER TO BE ARRAIGNED FOR MURDER OF HER NEWBORN BY STABBING BABY
DAUGHTER MULTIPLE TIMES AND HIDING HER CORPSE IN A CLOSET
SANTA ANA – A teen mother will be arraigned tomorrow on charges of
murdering her newborn immediately after giving birth by stabbing her
multiple times and hiding the corpse in her closet. Yoselin Torres
Tovar, 18, Fullerton, is charged with one felony count of murder and one
felony count of assault on a child with force likely to produce great
bodily injury resulting in death. If convicted, she faces a maximum
sentence of 25 years to life in state prison. The People will be
requesting Tovar be held on $1 million bail at her arraignment tomorrow,
Friday, April 23, 2010, at the Central Justice Center in Santa Ana. The
time and Department are to be determined.
Between 7 and 9 p.m. on April 18, 2010, Tovar is accused of
giving birth to a baby girl in the bathroom of her family's Fullerton
home. The defendant is accused of stabbing the newborn multiple times,
wrapping her body, and placing her in Tovar's bedroom closet. No one in
her family knew she was pregnant. When her family saw blood on the
defendant, they took her to St. Jude Hospital in Fullerton.
Upon arriving at the hospital, doctors examined Tovar and determined
that she had just given birth and alerted police. Shortly after, Tovar
is accused of expelling the placenta at the hospital. That same night,
Fullerton Police officers found the discarded newborn in the defendant's
bedroom closet.
Senior Deputy District Attorney Steve McGreevy of the Homicide Unit is
prosecuting this case.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.