A 15-year-old girl killed her newborn baby by assaulting him and stuffing his throat with cotton wool to prevent people discovering her pregnancy, a court has heard.
Paris Mayo, now 19, is on trial for the murder of her son Stanley Mayo, who died in Ross-on-Wye, Herefordshire, on the evening of 23 March 2019, and was discovered in a bin bag outside her home the following day.
Opening the case at Worcester crown court, the prosecutor Jonas Hankin KC told the jury that Mayo gave birth to her son alone in the living room of her family home while her parents were upstairs.
The teenager then assaulted the newborn, fracturing his skull and leaving him with a “severe brain injury”, the court heard.
The jury were told that, approximately two hours later, Mayo realised the infant was still alive so she stuffed pieces of cotton wool down his throat to suffocate him, before placing the baby’s body in a bin bag and leaving it outside the front door.
The next day, she asked her brother to put the bag in the bin, claiming it was “full of sick”, but on noticing the bag was unusually heavy, her mother looked inside to discover the body.
“The defendant killed the baby to prevent the discovery of her pregnancy and the birth,” Hankin said.
“She didn’t want a baby. Despite having parents and siblings who she acknowledged are loving and supportive, and who she could have turned to for help and advice, she murdered the baby.”
Mayo, who denies murder, claimed she did not know she was pregnant, and the baby was not moving or breathing after birth.
The prosecution said a postmortem concluded the baby was born near or at full-term, and was born alive, weighing 7lb 12oz.
The postmortem also found cotton wool that was forced so deeply into the child’s oesophagus, it was only discovered on dissection of the neck at autopsy.
Mayo claimed she had used the cotton wool to clean fluid, which was coming out of the baby’s mouth, and had put the body in a bag so her mother would not find out.
When Mayo’s mother called the emergency services after discovering the baby’s body, she could be heard telling her daughter: “You could have told me darling, you could have told me. Poor baby. Why didn’t you tell me?”
Mayo told paramedics that she did not know she was pregnant and thought she had just put on weight, adding that the baby had “fallen out of her”.
Later in hospital, she told a midwife the umbilical cord had been wrapped around the baby’s neck. She said: “It’s not my fault the baby died, is it? The head hit the floor and I was waiting for a noise. Do they think it’s my fault?”
Family and friends reported they had noticed Mayo wearing loose and baggy clothing in the weeks running up to the birth, which the prosecution allege showed she had purposely tried to conceal the pregnancy.
She later told a midwife she “had a feeling” she was pregnant and she “wished she’d listened to the back of her mind”.
When asked by her older sister why she hadn’t told anyone about the birth, Mayo replied: “Sometimes you just don’t think, do you? I was scared.”
The trial continues.
