A teenager who threw her newborn son into a trash compactor after giving birth in secret now faces the death penalty having been charged with murder.
Jakayla Williams, 18, later told detectives she ‘didn’t want a child’ because having a baby ‘cost too much money’, Will Benny, police chief in Dothan, Alabama, told reporters.
He said her family only learned she had given birth last week, with a concerned relative then accompanying her to a nearby hospital where she claimed to have left him with an employee.
But staff at the Southeast Health Medical Center called police when a review of the facility’s CCTV showed no sign of her ever having been there.
The police chief said it was determined that she had actually had a baby a week earlier, at around 7.30am on August 13.
‘Somewhere around 10am or 11am she went to an apartment complex on the west side of Dothan and placed a live newborn in a trash compactor,’ he added.
He said officers later found the baby’s remains still in the unemptied dumpster at a landfill site, wrapped in a mattress protector inside a zipped duffel bag.
