Orosi child abandonment trial begins

Published online on Wednesday, Sep. 30, 2009

An Orosi woman with a methamphetamine habit murdered her newborn baby by placing the infant in the back of a neighbor's pickup where the baby froze to death, a Tulare County prosecutor told a jury Wednesday.

And it almost happened twice before, prosecutor Janet Wise said.

Nancy Ortiz, 24, abandoned two other newborns in the same neighborhood in the same manner, but they were discovered in time by neighbors and are now in foster care.

But defense attorney Michelle Winspur painted Ortiz as a victim of both an unsupportive family that disapproved of her unwed motherhood and an uncooperative boyfriend.

Ortiz was a good student who got pregnant at 17 and kept the child, Winspur said. She got pregnant a second time and also kept that child, even though her family disapproved of both pregnancies. From then on, she hid her pregnancies, Winspur said.

After giving birth a third time, Ortiz "cleaned the baby and wrapped the baby and placed the baby where she thought it was safe," Winspur said. She did that in February 2005 and again in January 2006. Both babies were found in time.

But the last time, things went wrong. Ortiz thought a neighbor would find the infant in his truck, but he did not go to work that day, Winspur said. The baby girl was found dead on Dec. 3, 2006.

In addition to the murder charge, Ortiz is on trial for felony child endangerment for abandoning the two surviving infants and because one of her other children was found wandering the streets dirty, hungry and with no clothes, authorities said.

If found guilty of all charges, Ortiz faces a sentence of 22 years to life in prison.

Ortiz nervously shook her left leg, grasped tissues and sniffled as witnesses told of finding the babies.

The dead baby girl was found late in the day, said Gabriel Ortiz, 16 and no relation. He went to look for cigarettes in the back of the pickup, saw a black sweater and lifted it.

"I turned it over, and that's when I saw the baby," he said. It was purple and wasn't moving, he testified.

Marely Peña, who was home from college, lifted the sweater and looked at it.

"She went inside crying to tell her mom," Gabriel Ortiz said.

The mystery of the abandoned newborns in Orosi stumped authorities until they got a tip leading them to Nancy Ortiz in 2007. DNA evidence linked her to all three babies, officials said, and she was arrested in July 2007.

Ortiz told authorities she hid her pregnancies from her mother by wearing baggy clothes and secretly gave birth inside the family home, an investigator testified at a preliminary hearing.

Dr. Christine Nelson, then a physician at Kaweah Delta Hospital who was among the first to treat the abandoned babies, testified that one of them was exposed to meth during pregnancy and needed methadone.