Friday, May 22, 2009
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) — A mother playing with her children at a park spotted a little black sneaker sticking out of the sand underneath the playground equipment. Figuring a youngster had lost his shoe, she bent down to pick it up. It was strangely heavy.
She had made a ghastly discovery: a dead little boy, buried in the sand.
For nearly a week, who the toddler was, how he died and who put him there were a chilling mystery until Thursday, when a drawing of the youngster circulated by police led to the arrest of a young mother on murder charges.
Albuquerque police said Tiffany Toribio, 23, confessed suffocating her 3-year-old son, Tyruss “Ty” Toribio, as he slept on the climbing gym — a crime so cold-blooded that neighbors struggled to comprehend it, and even veteran officers became choked up.
“For a mother to kill her own child is unfathomable. Most people can’t even imagine how you could even think about doing something like that,” said Cmdr. Michael Geier. “We’ll never really understand why that happened, but we now understand the dynamics of what led up to that.”
Toribio was homeless and sleeping in the park, having been kicked out of her mother’s home and a friend’s apartment in the days before her son’s death because she was ignoring the boy and withholding affection, investigators said.
“What makes this story especially sad was when asked the reason why she took Ty’s life, Tiffany said that she did not want him to grow up with no one caring about him the same way that she had grown up with no one caring about her,” said Police Chief Ray Schultz, his eyes watery and his voice thick with emotion.
What had baffled police after the discovery of the body was that the chubby-cheeked boy appeared to have been well-fed, showed no signs of physical abuse and was wearing a matching outfit that seemed to suggest he had been well-cared-for.
But when no one came forward to report a missing child, police came to suspect that whoever buried Ty was a parent or someone taking care of him.
Police went door-to-door in the neighborhood around the park. They contacted schools, day-care centers and homeless shelters. They asked families at other playgrounds about the boy. They reviewed hours of video surveillance tapes from courthouses, hospitals and stores. They followed up on more than 100 tips.
The break in the case came just hours after police released a photographlike picture of the boy. Family members and others called a tip line to say the picture of “Baby Angel” — as neighbors living near the park nicknamed him — looked like Ty.