Mother found guilty of murdering newborn twins in Missouri
Saint LOUIS –
A Missouri mother, who reported that her newborn twins were stillborn, has been found guilty of manslaughter.
Maya Caston, 28, was convicted Friday of second-degree manslaughter and two counts of endangering a child. Louis Post-Dispatch reported that the jury found her on a lesser charge instead of convicting her of second-degree murder.
Prosecutors argued that Caston’s failure to take care of the children showed that she caused the deaths. And her extensive internet searches on miscarriage methods and prenatal abortions prove that she doesn’t want to have children.
Evidence shows that Caston searched Google for “cheap abortion pills,” “free abortion clinics” and “can you cause a miscarriage if you hit yourself hard enough in the stomach?” After she gave birth, Cason researched whether you could bury a baby in the back garden.
Caston told the jury that she planned to have the children adopted at her doctor’s appointment three days after they were born, but at the time, the children were already dead after they stopped eating.
“We have two dead children. She doesn’t want them. She doesn’t care about them,” Assistant Prosecutor Thomas Dittmeier said in the final argument. “She didn’t even name them.”
Caston’s public defenders argued that she was intellectually disabled and did not understand the risks to the infant.
“I was shocked. I didn’t know what to do,” she told the jury.