Tiona Rodriguez, 18, is accused of giving birth in secret, murdering her baby boy, then taking a detour to shoplift on the way to dump the body
A teenage mother caught with her dead newborn son in a shopping bag while allegedly shoplifting at Victoria's Secret has been charged with murdering the baby.
Tiona Rodriguez, 18, was stopped on suspicion of stealing a $44.50 pair of skinny jeans from the store in New York's Herald Square store, the New York Daily News reported.
When security searched her bag, they made the grim discovery.
The teenager was today charged with second degree murder over the incident, which happened in 2013.
Prosecutor Rachel Ferrari said Rodriguez "carried out the murder of her newborn infant and then callously shoved him in a bag with the plan of — in her words to ‘take this s**t and dig a hole, put it somewhere, lol, then we go eat IHOP".
The teen mother, from Brooklyn, is thought to have fallen pregnant in early 2013 but believed she would be in "big trouble" if her family found out.
Ferrari said Rodriguez planned to kill the infant and "began plotting weeks before he was born".
When she went into labour on October 16, 2013, she went to a friend's home in Queens where she gave birth in a bath tub "ripping the cord with her bare hands".
The baby boy was full term and weighed 8lbs, prosecutors said.
Ferrari added: "He wasn't stillborn, he didn't die of natural causes. He was murdered in that bathroom."
Rodriguez is then accused of stuffing the baby's body into a shopping bag and setting out to dispose of it.
But she is believed to have made a detour to Victoria Secret in a bid to steal - stuffing items into the same bag that carried her dead son.
Prosecutors revealed Rodriguez had been pregnant twice before and was "well-versed" in hiding her pregnancies and childbirth.
She fell pregnant at 14 and her family only discovered the truth when she was in labour in hospital.
Rodriguez gave birth for the second time in 2012, aged 15. She is believed to have delivered the baby in her bathtub at home.
Prosecutor Ferrari said: "She may have killed the baby, the baby may have been stillborn - but we know that she texted her boyfriend throughout the birth, ultimately telling him - it's dead.
"Then the two of them discussed via text getting rid of it. Smashing it up, so it didn't look like a body. Burning it. Meeting up to bury it."
She told no one after falling pregnant for the third time.
Rodriguez's lawyer Earl Ward argued that both the second and third pregnancies resulted in miscarriages.
He said his client was a "confused young girl who had no idea what to do with the fetus that was stillborn", the Daily News reported.
She was ordered held without bail by Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Thomas Farber.
She faces 15 years to life in prison if convicted.
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