Brandon Thoma & Taylor Blaha, Fort Dodge, Iowa parents drown newborn baby to stop her crying following concerns that the girl’s presence could raise alarms as the mother had been using meth during pregnancy and feared their other child being taken away.
A mother and father in Iowa have been accused of drowning their baby daughter in a bathtub moments after the infant was born, in a bid to stop the baby girl from crying.
Brandon Thoma, 31, and Taylor Blaha, 24, submerged the newborn in water after the mom took meth to help ease the pain of her home birth.
Hours after drowning Kayleen Lee Blaha, Thoma disposed of the newborn in a nearby landfill according to a Facebeook release via the Fort Dodge Police Dept.
When detectives from the Webster County Sheriff’s Office seized their phones after learning about the incident they discovered that both had been searching for ways to induce a miscarriage.
The pair following their arrest on Wednesday were charged with first-degree murder. Thoma has also been charged with abuse of a corpse. Their bails were set at $1.05million and $1million respectively.
Parents had no intention of keeping newborn
According to an affidavit, on November 22 cops received a call from an Iowa Department of Human Services employee reporting that Blaha had been admitted to a hospital and that she had given birth to a baby at home and later disposed of it
Alarmed by the reports, she contacted the Webster County Sheriff’s Office and a detective went to the hospital according to the DesMoinesRegister.
Blaha then told that detective that on November 16 she gave birth to a girl in the bathroom of her home in Fort Dodge.
She also mentioned that the father was Thoma and that the couple already had a two-year-old son together.
She told the detective that Thoma was in the bedroom while she gave birth but once she was born he came into the bathroom and cut the umbilical cord before helping to move her, with the baby, from the toilet to the bathtub.
When she delivered the baby it was alive, crying, and waving its arms, the affidavit says. To ease the pain she asked Thoma for meth.
Blaha told the detective she never had any intention of keeping the baby and that the plan was to allow her sister to adopt her.
Drowned newborn, placed her in trashbag and then backpack
In a statement on December 7, Thoma revealed that he was concerned that should law enforcement find out about the baby, they could find meth in its system and confiscate their other child, the two-year-old son.
The couple ‘paranoid’ that the newborn’s crying was likely to raise the suspicion to neighbors, a joint decision was made to drown her the baby girl according to WHO13.
According to the affidavit, Thoma demonstrated to Blaha that could be achieved by placing the baby in the bathtub, which was half full, and submerging her.
Once she had been killed Thoma removed the baby’s body from the bathtub before wrapping it up in trash bags and placing it in a backpack, which he used to take her out of the apartment.
Blaha told the detective that Thoma left with the backpack in the early hours of the morning the next day and when he returned it was empty.
On December 5, Thoma eventually told police where the body had been discarded, in a rural area to the north of the North Central Iowa Regional landfill.
Newborn body yet to be located
In surveillance footage police watched Thoma leave the apartment with the backpack and return with a backpack that was ‘very clearly empty’.
After seizing their phones police found that both Thoma and Blaha had been searching for information as to how a miscarriage could be induced.
Thoma also spoke of how he cut the baby’s umbilical cord with a pair of scissors they had in their apartment and kept segments of it as a means to remember the baby.
Police later found either those segments of the umbilical cord or the placenta in the top drawer of a dresser in the couple’s home.
As of Dec. 7, the body of the newborn has yet to be found.
