For leaving a dead newborn baby inside a Houston gas station toilet last year, a 27-year-old Texas mother will serve several of years in prison.
After Diana Guadalupe Zavala Lopez entered a guilty plea to one count of tampering with evidence—a human corpse—and one count of tampering/fabricating physical evidence with the intent to obstruct an investigation, Harris County District Judge Kristin M. Guiney on Monday sentenced her to four years in a state correctional facility.
Guiney also credited Zavala Lopez with 489 days already served.
As previously reported by Law&Crime, agents from US Customs and Border Protection apprehended Zavala Lopez in August 2023 at a bus station in Brownsville, Texas, the largest city in the United States’ Lower Rio Grande Valley.
In a press release, federal authorities identified Zavala Lopez as a Mexican national and “migrant who overstayed her visitor visa and was successfully taken into custody.” The release goes on to describe her as “a homicide suspect attempting to flee to Mexico,” but no homicide charges were filed against the defendant.
Following her arrest, a Houston Police Department spokesperson told Law&Crime that the agency would “likely interview her again to get more details” and that the only charge was the one count of evidence tampering mentioned on Twitter—but that the investigation is still ongoing.
“We still have to speak with her,” said an HPD public information officer. “Beyond that, it depends on the rest of the investigation.”
Later, they charged her with tampering with additional evidence.
According to the probable cause affidavit, on April 2, 2023, a customer went to use the restroom at a Shell gas station in southwest Houston in the middle of the night.
Upon entering the restroom, the customer discovered a child inside the toilet. Paramedics from the Houston Fire Department found the girl dead after more than an hour.
Then, before the newborn’s death, police posted footage to the department’s YouTube page that showed a “person of interest”—later identified as Zavala Lopez—leaving the gas station.
The footage, seemingly edited, shows the woman exiting her parked car at one of the pumps and passing through the front door of the filling station.
The camera focuses on her face as she enters the store. The footage then cuts to the same woman getting back into her car and driving off into the night. Finally, the video concludes with three different still images of the wanted woman taken as she entered.
During a press conference announcing efforts to enlist the public’s help in the case by releasing the video, HPD Homicide Detective Calab Bowling stated that the woman in the video was at the gas station for about 15 minutes before leaving.
“No one else went inside that bathroom, and [the newborn] was not there when she walked in before,” Browning said, later clarifying that witness statements supported her interpretation of events. “It appears that she gave birth in the restroom.”
Authorities have not revealed the child’s name or cause of death.
