MIAMI, FL — A 69-year-old Florida mother pleaded guilty Friday to first-degree murder, aggravated child abuse, torture and related offenses in connection with the death of her adopted young daughter and the prolonged abuse of the girl’s twin brother nearly a decade ago by she and her husband.
Prosecutors said the twins were regularly bound with packing tape and forced to remain in a bathtub for hours at a time because they were considered evil.
“Today, Carmen Barahona accepted responsibility for the atrocities which she inflicted on two innocent children placed in her care, and eventually adopted by her and her husband, and co-defendant, Jorge Barahona,” Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle told reporters in announcing the guilty plea.
As part of the plea agreement, prosecutors will not seek the death penalty against Carmen Barahona, but she must testify against her husband when his trial gets underway in April.
“Not only does she have to testify, she has to cooperate and she has to testify truthfully in the case against her co-defendant, her husband — the real killer,” Fernandez Rundle said. “To come to this point in nine years, to now have the … adopted mother pleading guilty to life, and agreeing to fully and truthfully testify against the real killer, that’s really a wonderful step forward for justice.”
In her sworn statement with Miami-Dade police, Carmen Barahona said twins Nubia and Victor Barahona were placed in the couple’s home at age 3-and-a-half in 2000. They were later adopted by the couple, who had already been parenting two other adopted children.
The twins had been sexually abused by their biological father and suffered from behavioral problems as a result, according to the woman’s statement to police.
She said they boasted of trying to drown the couple’s other son in a swimming pool by holding him under water. She also said the twins sickened the family with rat poison.
“We didn’t know why we were getting sick. And so they told Jorge that they had put rat poison in our food, and that’s why we were getting sick,” Carmen Barahona recalled. “She took him to where she had gotten the rat poison, which was at the corner of the dining room.”
Her husband’s reaction was to place the twins in the bathtub and to self-medicate by taking as many as 20 sleeping pills and allergy medications at a time.
She said her husband beat the twins with a shoe at times and eventually took them out of school to prevent them from coming into contact with other children and teachers who might recognize the bruises on their bodies as signs of abuse.
Carmen Barahona also acknowledged under questioning that Nubia Barahona suffered from vomiting at times.
“You think maybe being tied up in the bathtub all day, and having your dad have three-hour religious ceremonies with you trying to pray the devil out of you might cause you a little bit of stress,” a detective asked the woman.
“Of course,” she replied.
At one point, the woman told police Nubia Barahona had been taken out of the home by her husband. He initially insisted the girl was left with his sister, but that turned out to be false.
Carmen Barahona said she last saw her daughter on the same day a piece of carpeting had been removed from the family’s home.
The 10-year-old’s body was found on Valentine’s Day of 2011 on Interstate 95 near the Palm Beach Lakes Boulevard exit in West Palm Beach, Florida.
“I didn’t know where she was killed, or how she was killed, even that she was dead,”Carmen Barahona insisted. “I didn’t know. I did not know.”
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