Paris Mayo has been found guilty of murdering her young son at her family home in Herefordshire
A teenager has been found guilty of murdering her baby hours after giving birth alone at home.
Paris Mayo was 15 years old when she gave birth to him in 2019, after hiding her pregnancy from her family.
At a trial at Worcester Crown Court, Mayo suffocated him by stuffing cotton into his mouth and throat.
Jurors were also able to consider an infanticide charge, but it took eight hours and 38 minutes to convict her of murder.
Warning: This article contains distressing content.
Mayo, from Ruardean in Gloucestershire, gave birth to Stanley at her family’s home in Ross-on-Wye in Herefordshire in March 2019.
The court heard how her mother discovered her remains the next morning in a garbage bag that Mayo had left on her doorstep before she went to bed.
Ms Mayo immediately called 999 after making the discovery and later in hospital, the teenager said she had not told her mother what had happened because “so much was happening to her”.
Mayo had claimed that she did not know she was pregnant and said that Stanley did not move or make a sound when he was born.
However, medical experts said it was likely that he had been alive for a couple of hours, breathing and also crying.
During his trial, Mayo told the jury that he loved his son and often thinks about “what could have been.”
She said she had used the cotton that was found in the baby’s mouth and throat to clean up the blood and claimed that his fractured skull had been caused by a fall to the ground during childbirth.
However, the prosecution said that medical evidence showed that this was not an adequate explanation and that such injuries were usually found after major trauma, such as a car accident.
The court heard how Mayo had a difficult home life and her father, who was terminally ill at the time Stanley was born and died soon after, made her feel “useless”.
He had been upstairs receiving dialysis with the help of Mayo’s mother, Coralie, while the baby was murdered downstairs.
‘devastating case’
In her testimony, Mayo described how she began having sex at age 13 and used it as a way to get people to like her because she was “insecure” due to her family situation.
Mayo wept in the dock after the jury, made up of five men and seven women, returned a majority verdict of guilty for murder.
Judge Garnham thanked the jurors, who said it had been a “difficult and stressful case” for them.
Following the verdict, West Mercia Police Detective Inspector Julie Taylor said it was “a devastating case”.
“The death of a newborn baby is absolutely heartbreaking, even more so when the baby’s own mother is responsible,” she said.
Mayo had hidden her pregnancy from people who “could and would have supported her,” she said.
A spokesperson for the Crown Prosecution Service said Stanley’s “short life was filled with pain and suffering when he should have been nurtured and loved”.
“(Mayo) chose to hide her pregnancy, give birth alone and kill her baby, then hide her body despite accepting that she had a family that would have supported her.”
The 19-year-old has been taken into custody and is scheduled to return to Worcester Crown Court on Monday for sentencing.
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