A Dothan, Alabama, woman has been sentenced to spend the rest of her life behind bars after pleading guilty to the capital murder of her newborn son.
Jakayla Ashanti Williams, now 21, pleaded guilty Monday to one count of capital murder and was sentenced by Houston County Circuit Judge Henry D. Binford to life in prison without the possibility of parole, Breitbart reported.
She took the deal at the last possible moment, as the judge prepared to qualify a jury, and in doing so ducked the death penalty Houston County District Attorney Russ Goodman had been pushing for since 2023.
According to WTVY News 4, Williams was 18 when she gave birth at home in August 2023.
She did not tell her family she was pregnant. When they later learned a child had been born, she fed them a story that she had surrendered the boy to a “redheaded” employee in the lobby of Southeast Health Medical Center under Alabama’s Safe Haven law.
That law lets a parent leave an unharmed newborn at a hospital, fire station, or other designated place with no questions asked and no criminal charge.
The family went to the hospital looking for the baby. Staff called the police. Surveillance video proved Williams had never set foot in the building.
After hours of questioning, she admitted the truth: she had taken the infant to an apartment complex on Dothan’s west side, a complex she had no connection to, and put him in a compacting dumpster while he was still alive.
Investigators seized the dumpster, followed the load to the city landfill, and found the child’s remains inside a zipped duffel bag, wrapped in a mattress protector.
Prosecutors maintained the boy was alive when his mother put him in the machine. The defense argued there was no proof of that and floated postpartum distress and youth as mitigation.
According to the Dothan Police Department:
As the investigation began, it was quickly determined the female never went to Southeast Health on the date she alleged.
A formal interview was conducted with the female who attempted to continue her same story.
When presented with the fact we had proven she never took the newborn child to the hospital as she claimed, she told investigators she had taken the newborn child and wrapped him in a blanket and placed it into a trash dumpster at an apartment complex on the west side of town.
She stated when she placed the newborn child in the dumpster, he was still alive. Investigators went to that location and located a trash compactor attached to a dumpster.
The dumpster was seized by the Dothan Police Department and taken to the City of Dothan land field where investigators and officers sifted through the contents.
During that process, the remains of a newborn child were located wrapped in a mattress protector that was in a zipped-up duffel bag.
Those remains have been sent to the Alabama Department of Forensic Sciences in Montgomery for confirmation that those remains are in fact the missing newborn child.
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