The father of a 17-month-old baby girl sat down to feed his daughter a bottle, but the regular feeding didn’t go as planned.
She began vomiting and refusing to swallow, which was unusual for the otherwise healthy eater. Then, the dad got a closer look at his daughter and saw what his wife was doing when nobody was looking.
According to ABC7, at some point in the day, Vazquez-Hernandez poured liquid nail polish remover in with the baby’s milk, as if the potent chemical would somehow go unnoticed by both the child and father. Clearly, this could have ended fatally for the baby, but luckily, she reacted the way she did and spit it out, mitigating her evil stepmother’s best attempt to poison her.
The Chicago Tribune reports that Vazquez-Hernandez had a troubled relationship with her husband’s ex-partner, the toddler’s biological mother.
Court documents show that Vasquez-Hernandez and her husband had been in a relationship and had a child together in 2010. The couple briefly separated for two years, and during that time, the husband had a child with another woman, according to the Tribune.
The Tribune also reported that Vasquez-Hernandez would repeatedly send messages to the other woman, telling her to stop texting or calling her husband unless there was an emergency with the child. Prosecutors say that the toddler was “a constant reminder of a forbidden relationship.”
After her arrest, Vasquez-Hernandez reportedly told police in a statement that she wanted to “punish” her husband and the other woman.
The Chicago Sun-Times reports that Vasquez-Hernandez’s bond has been set at $250,000. She is expected to appear in court on June 27.
A similar incident occurred in 2015, when a Maryland mother force-fed her 5-year-old son, Daniel Dana, a bottle of cold medicine every two to four hours until he died. The Washington Post reports that the mother, 35-year-old Narges Shafeirad, attempted to cover her tracks by placing her son’s body in the back seat of her car and driving to a gas station, where she then doused the car in gasoline.
She told detectives that she and her son were on her way to the beach and that she had gasoline in her car as a precaution in case she couldn’t find an open gas station. She then said that she lit a cigarette and the car caught fire.
Shafeirad had a strained relationship with her ex-husband, who had joint custody of the child. At one point, she told him: “I will make you cry. You will be sorry.”
She was sentenced to 50 years in prison for murder.
