BBC
A 19-year-old who murdered her newborn son hours after giving birth has been jailed for at least 12 years.
A trial heard Paris Mayo, then 15, suffocated the boy, Stanley, by stuffing cotton wool into his mouth and throat.
Mayo delivered him alone at her family home in Ross-on-Wye, in March 2019, while her parents were upstairs.
“Killing your baby son was a truly dreadful thing to do,” said the judge, Mr Justice Garnham, passing sentence.
The trial heard she had assaulted Stanley, leaving him with injuries comparable to those seen in a car crash.
“How you did this is not clear, but I suspect you crushed his head, probably beneath your foot,” the judge told Mayo.
Her initial assault caused him “serious damage”, but did not kill him, the judge added.
“He remained alive and continued to breathe for at least an hour. You decided you had to finish Stanley off by stuffing cotton wool balls into his throat.”
The newborn was found by Mayo’s mother the day after his birth, dumped in a bin bag left on the doorstep.
It was she who alerted emergency services in an emotional 999 call played to the jury.
Mayo had claimed she did not know she was pregnant, also telling the court of her difficult family life and her father who had made her feel “worthless”.
In her testimony, she described how she started having sex at 13 and used it as a way to get people to like her, because she was “insecure” due to her family situation.
The court heard her father Patrick Mayo – who died 10 days after Stanley – had been upstairs on dialysis treatment with Mayo’s mother at…
