Nyesha Hall-Gonzalez, 28, an El Paso County, Colo. mom, was arrested on Saturday for attempted first degree murder of her own 2-year-old son. Court documents reveal that Hall-Gonzalez wrapped the toddler in her coat and a dress, buried him under 4 feet of tumbleweeds and left him to die in an El Paso County field, the Colorado Springs Gazette reports.
When Carmelo Ortiz-Hall asked his mother to stay, Hall-Gonzalez told him, "she had to leave," according to court documents.
7News reports that the arrest affidavit depicts a suicidal and unemotional woman that had assumed she had killed her son just hours before he was found healthy and with only superficial injuries on Saturday. She was going through a divorce and had planned to kill herself and her son because "no one would want him after she killed herself," the Colorado Springs Gazette quoted from the arrest affidavit.
The case began Saturday morning when the El Paso County Sheriff's Office received a phone call that a woman had been spotted wandering around in her nightgown. Earlier that morning a Colorado State Patrol trooper had spotted Hall-Gonzalez holding a toddler next to her car beside I-25.
Then around 1 p.m., police tracking dog Axel picked up the scent of the little boy and the dog's handler Deputy Mark Miller found him cold and scared, but alive, in a drainage ditch near some railroad tracks and covered under tumbleweeds, KRDO reported. The boy was then taken to the hospital and reunited with his father.
KKTV reports that police search teams knew that they had to act quickly to find the boy because there is no shelter, just open field, where the boy was found. Joe Breister, with the Sheriff's Office told KKTV, "The location that he was found in -- there's also some coyote tracks in that area, so it could have been a very, very sad situation."
Lt. Lari Sevene told KRDO that a Axel, the tracking dog, deserves a lot of credit for the successful discovery of the child, "Based on where he was found, the fact that there was brush around him and over top of him, the likelihood of a human finding him in that short of time is next to nothing."
Hall-Gonzalez is being held at the El Paso County jail on a $50,000 bond, according to the Pueblo Chieftain.