Lilian Alvarado indicted: Prosecutors have arraigned a mother for the murder of her newborn while the woman’s defense argue she’s not mentally competent.
Lilian Alvarado a 24 year old Washington D.C woman has been indicted after drowning her newborn son in a bathtub before dismembering the child’s body and then trying to flush him down a toilet.
According to a report via the Washington Post the mother was indicted by federal prosecutors and is expected to be arraigned in Washington DC’s Superior Court on Friday.
The mother is expected to face life without parole if she is found guilty.
Lilian Alvarado’s indictment comes after prosecutors accused the woman of strangling and drawing her son on Thanksgiving morning, November 28, 2013.
From there the woman allegedly dismember her newborn son before flushing his body down a toilet insider her family apartment in the block of 14th st NW.
Evidence of the crime was discovered when people living below Alvarado saw bloody water leaking down the walls.
At the time, the then 21 year old woman had declined telling her family she was pregnant before giving birth in the family bathtub. At the time Alvarado is reported to have told her father the child was born dead.
Why the daughter had declined to tell her parents she was pregnant is yet to be necessarily understood.
Of note, police investigators told of finding scissors and knives near the dead baby’s body.
It wasn’t until a few months later that investigators determined that the mother had sought to purposefully end her newborn’s life that Alvarado was arrested in January 2014 by the Metropolitan Police Department.
A coroner’s report via the District of Columbia’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner determined the infant died from asphyxiation and dismemberment.
At the time, the mother insisted the newborn was dead at the time of birth.
A previous report in January, 2014 via the washingtonpost cited Alvarado’s 70-year-old father, Santiago Alvarado, saying that family members thought his daughter was taking a shower on the morning of the child’s birth. Family members allegedly unaware that the woman was pregnant.
The father also said that his daughter had a history of mental illness and that during episodes, she is unable to communicate.
Told the father at the time in Spanish, ‘She has mental disturbances sometimes, and when that happens, she doesn’t talk.’
Adding: ‘She goes out of her mind. The doctors diagnosed her with a sickness.’
The father did not know the diagnosis.
The father said at the time his daughter had come to the United States from El Salvador about a year ago, fleeing the violence in her native country, where her husband was killed. She made a living cleaning houses in the Washington area, and ‘she worked very hard,‘ he said.
Responding to prosecutor’s indictment against their client, Alvarado’s public defenders argue she is not mentally competent to be tried and should instead remain at a psychiatric hospital.
Nevertheless the washingtonpost notes psychiatrists having found Alvarado competent and that she has been ordered to stand trial.
Lilian Alvarado will faces multiple charges, including first-degree murder and cruelty to children. Alvarado has a two year old daughter.
