The woman who pleaded guilty to stabbing her newborn son to death and dumping his body in a trash bin last year acted out of desperation, the judge who heard her case said.
Angelina Sarmiento, 26, working for low wages, to repay the person who brought her to the United States illegally and was also sending money back to Honduras to pay for her ill daughter's medical care, the judge said.
Sarmiento pleaded guilty first-degree manslaughter in the death of the her newborn when she appeared in Stamford Superior Court on Tuesday. She has agreed to serve a 17-year prison sentence.
“This is a woman who's working at slave wages, sending the proceeds of that effort back to her home country to support her very ill child," Judge Richard Comerford Jr. said, according to the Stamford Advocate. "This is a woman who truly loved her children."
Sarmiento has worked 55 to 65 hours per week, cleaning house for a $350 per week, the Advocate reports.
Sarmiento's lawyer, public defender Howard Ehring, said his client didn't intend to get pregnant and she believed her husband didn't want the financial burden of another child. He returned to Honduras and has had an accident, leaving him a paraplegic and the family unable to continue the ill child’s dialysis treatments, the newspaper reports.
She bought birth control on the black market because she was afraid to go to a doctor because of her illegal status, the newspaper reports. She was surprised to learn she was pregnant.
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Sentencing was set for Dec. 11.
