Texas Police Say Baby Probably Cried Before 14-Year-Old Mom Killed Him in Flush Attempt

BAYTOWN, Texas – A baby born to a 14-year-old mother in a restroom at her junior high was alive at birth, dying only after she tried to flush it down the toilet, officials said Thursday.

Police also announced Thursday that the baby born Wednesday was a boy.

Baytown police Lt. Eric Freed said the baby boy was probably full term and cried once before his mother tried to flush him down the toilet.

An autopsy confirmed the infant was alive.

The mother, an eighth-grader at Cedar Bayou Junior High, was taken to a hospital Wednesday. People who knew her at school said she wore baggy clothing, and nobody suspected she was pregnant, the Houston Chronicle reported Thursday.

School officials first learned of her pregnancy when another student in the restroom when the eighth-grader was in labor rushed to the school nurse to ask for help, said Kathy Clausen, spokeswoman for Baytown's Goose Creek school district. The nurse and an assistant principal ran back to the bathroom, discovered the girl had already given birth and called 911.

Authorities have not announced what, if any, charges the girl will face. Killing an infant is a capital crime in Texas, but 14-year-olds are too young to be eligible for the death penalty, said Geoffrey Corn, an assistant professor at South Texas College of Law.

The incident came just three days after another 14-year-old girl delivered a stillborn fetus in the bathroom of an airplane on her way back to Houston from a middle-school field trip.

Baytown is about 25 miles east of Houston.