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Mom accused in newborn slay: I want to die
Special to AM-NewYork
By Liseth Perez-Almeida
January 12, 2007

The young mother accused of leaving the hospital with her infant son, then killing him and tossing him into a trash can on a Queens street corner says she has a simple wish: She wants to die.

"I just want to fall asleep and never wake up," Lucila Rojas, 25, said Thursday in a jailhouse interview during which she explained how her child reminded her of the rape that produced him. "I didn't know what to do with him. I was confused. I had no one with me. I wouldn't be able to work.

"When I saw his face I remembered what happened to me. I didn't even know who his father was."

Rojas, an illegal Mexican immigrant, has been at the psychiatric center at Elmhurst General Hospital since her arrest Monday. She is charged with second-degree murder. During an hour-long interview yesterday, she seemed resigned to her fate.

"My lawyer and everyone else here says I'm going to spend the rest of my life in jail," Rojas said, breaking into tears repeatedly. At Rikers, she said other prisoners were telling her, "You should die." She said she is in a solitary cell.

The case unfolded Monday afternoon when Rojas told police a black man stuck a gun in her back outside Jacobi Medical Center in the Bronx and told her to hand over her 3-week-old son, Anthony, or else he would her kill her daughter, Stephanie, 3.

Under questioning, however, she continually changed details of her story, pollice said, and they quickly realized there had been no abduction and that Stephanie was not with her.

Eventually, police learned that Rojas had given birth on Dec. 17 at Jacobi, but Anthony had to stay in the hospital because he was born two months premature.

According to police, on New Year's Eve, the day it was time for Anthony to come home, she went to the Bronx hospital to get him, then walked away determined to end his life because he was conceived when two men raped her while she was visiting her parents in Mexico. She admits she never reported it to Mexican officials.

Police said that as she left the Bronx on a bus headed to Queens, she pulled a heavy blanket over Anthony's head and didn't remove it until she got off the bus in Jackson Heights, near her niece's home. Police said she stuffed him into a black plastic bag and dumped him in a trash can on Northern Boulevard.

Police still have not found the 5-pound boy, though they plan to head to Pennsylvania this weekend to search a landfill where trash from New York City is taken.

Thursday during the jailhouse interview, Rojas changed part of her story, insisting she got nervous around police and concocted the tale of the trash can. Instead, she said, she dumped Anthony in a closet in her Castle Hill apartment after suffocating him, a claim that sent police racing to her home. The search didn't turn up anything.

Rojas said she never reported the rape because her attackers vowed to kill Stephanie, who had traveled with her to Mexico, if she did.

She had Anthony, she said, because abortion is illegal in Mexico and she didn't have the money to pay for an illegal one.

When she returned to the Bronx on Nov. 8, she said she kept her pregnancy a secret from Carlos Vidal, 25, her live-in boyfriend and Stephanie's father. Worse, she said, Carlos confessed that he fell in love with another woman while she was away.

"I'm sorry," she said. "If I was with somebody when I picked him up I wouldn't have done that."

Liseth Perez-Almeida is a Hoy staff writer. Newsday staff writer Rocco Parascandola contributed to this story.