A 19-year-old Kent woman faces a second-degree murder charge for allegedly striking her 2-year-old son more than once in the abdomen and slamming him down on a hardwood floor after he wouldn’t go back to sleep.
Sandy Noemi Fernandez is scheduled to be arraigned at 9 a.m. Aug. 11 at the general courtroom of the Maleng Regional Justice Center in Kent, according to the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office. She remained in custody Aug. 2 at the King County Correctional Facility in Seattle with bail set at $1 million, according to jail records.
Kent Police arrested Fernandez July 28 at her West Hill residence, according to charging documents filed Aug. 1 by the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office.
On a period between May 15 and May 23, Fernandez allegedly assaulted the boy who suffered massive internal injuries, including a skull fracture, fractured jaw, internal bleeding from several areas in the torso, which then led to an infection and multiple contusions and abrasions on his body, according to charging papers.
Fernandez, after initially denying any physical abuse of her son, later admitted becoming frustrated with him and striking him in the abdomen and slamming him to the ground, according to court documents.
Fernandez called 911 at about 11:31 a.m. on May 23 to report that her son wasn’t breathing, according to court documents. She said her son was cold and unresponsive.
Kent Police officers and Puget Sound Fire personnel responded to the Fernandez’s residence at the Hometown Suites in the 25100 block of Pacific Highway South, where she worked and stayed. The boy was pronounced deceased by Puget Sound Fire personnel. Officers observed bruises on the boy’s body.
Fernandez shares her residence with her 21-year-old boyfriend, who is not the boy’s father. The couple reported the boy began vomiting the prior morning. Fernandez said when she woke up to go to work in the morning, she saw the boy lying face down on the hardwood floor with his arms out to the side, according to charging papers. She said she didn’t check on him because she thought he was sleeping.
The boyfriend woke up just prior to the 911 call and found the boy in the same position, cold and unresponsive.
The King County Medical Examiner’s Office ruled on June 22 that the boy’s death was a homicide. The cause of death was multiple blunt force injuries, including a skull fracture and blunt force injury to his torso that led to hemorrhaging and infection.
Fernandez told a detective that she slammed the boy on the floor the morning he began puking. She said she was stressed from working so much and didn’t want to deal with the boy and just wanted him to go back to sleep, according to court documents.
After an interview with Fernandez, a detective was walking in the building hallway and overheard the woman yelling on the phone, “I didn’t know it would kill him mom, I didn’t know it would kill him.”
After detectives took Fernandez into custody, she tried to claim she only admitted in earlier interviews to abusing her son because she felt pressured but then admitted she had told the truth about hitting and slamming the boy and that she needed to be arrested, according to charging papers.
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