A teenager accused of murdering her newborn son has said she did not know she was pregnant until the last moment and insisted the child was not alive when she gave birth.
Paris Mayo, who was 15 when her son, Stanley, was born, told a jury that she loved her son and felt “horrible” about his death, wondering what he would have been like.
She said she had begun to have sex when she was 13 because she was insecure about her body and saw it was a way of making people like her.
The prosecution at Worcester crown court said Mayo gave birth to her son alone in the living room of her family home in Gloucestershire in March 2019.
It claims Mayo assaulted the newborn, fracturing his skull, and approximately two hours later realised the infant was still alive and 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.
Mayo – now 19 – told the court that when Stanley was born, he was silent and his eyes were closed. She said: “I started to panic because he wasn’t crying or making a noise and I got really scared. It all happened so fast, I don’t really remember a lot about it. I just remember he hit his head and that was really it. The [umbilical] cord was around his throat.”
Her barrister, Bernard Richmond KC, told her Stanley had skull fractures and asked: “Did you do them to him deliberately?”
Mayo replied: “No.”
Mayo accepts she put cotton wool balls into Stanley’s mouth but says it was because fluid was coming out of his mouth. “To me it looked like there was stuff coming out of his mouth,” she said.
She told the court: “It makes me feel really horrible because I knew I didn’t want to hurt him. I do feel stupid that I didn’t go and tell anyone and get help. I loved him. I always think about what he would be like and how he would have been.”
Richmond asked: “At any stage did you actually think Stanley was alive?”
“No,” she replied.
The court heard that Stanley was conceived in the summer of 2018 and by the autumn Mayo was suffering from sickness and back and abdominal pain. Mayo said she never knew for certain she was pregnant. At times she had suspicions but she explained away her symptoms.
Explaining why she had started having sex at a young age, Mayo said: “I just thought it was a way to get people to like me because I was quite insecure about the way I looked and the way I was made to feel about myself at home because my family situation was quite bad.”
She said her late father was a bully. “He thrived on us being scared of him,” she said.
Mayo, of Ruardean, Gloucestershire, denies murder. The trial continues.
