A 21-year-old Fullerton woman, who pleaded guilty last month to felony child abuse
in exchange for prosecutors dropping a murder count for drowning her
newborn boy in a toilet and
hiding his body in a bedroom trash can, has been sentenced to five years in state prison.
Yanira Bernice Valderrama, who was looking at the possibility of 15 years to life with the murder rap, was 19, pregnant but she didn't tell her parents about her condition when she delivered her son about two weeks early the night of Sept. 4, 2009.
]
She gave birth into her bathroom toilet in her
family's Fullerton home, staying there for 10 to 15
minutes until the baby drowned. She then wrapped his dead body in a towel or
t-shirt and placed the remains in a waste basket in her bedroom.
When her mother saw all the blood later that night, she dialed 9-1-1–and what her daughter had done began to unravel.
Previous coverage:
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.
One Reply to “Yanira Bernice Valderrama Gets 5 Years for Drowning Her Newborn and Tossing His Body in Trash”