Clark County coroner says baby girl born in bathtub died from ‘birth asphyxia’

Veronica Salazar didn’t want her mother to know she was pregnant with her second child, court records show, so she kept it a secret until she gave birth.

Early on July 6, “Baby Girl Salazar” was born in the bathtub of an apartment the woman shared in Las Vegas with her 4-year-old child and mother. Within hours, the dead infant was found in the bathtub with a wet, bloody towel.

Later that day, Salazar was booked in absentia on a murder charge. After her release from Sunrise Hospital and Medical Center, she was taken to the Clark County Detention Center, where she remains.

A county grand jury indicted Salazar, 20, in August on the murder charge. Her trial is scheduled for July.

On Friday, the county coroner’s office reported that Salazar’s baby died from “birth asphyxia.” The death has been ruled a homicide.

Salazar’s lawyer, Deputy Special Public Defender Clark Patrick, declined to comment Friday.

According to grand jury transcripts obtained Friday by the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Las Vegas police detective Philip DePalma asked Salazar why she concealed her pregnancy from everyone other than her boyfriend, the baby’s father.

“I did not know how to tell anybody,” she replied, according to the detective’s testimony. “I just felt like I wasn’t ready for another kid.” She also said she feared her mother.

At one point during the interview, she denied that she intentionally tried to hurt her baby.

Salazar told the detective that she wasn’t aware she was pregnant until about two months before the baby was born, when she began suffering from nausea and morning sickness.

She was bleeding and in pain before the birth, so she lay down in the apartment bathtub and turned on the shower.

After giving birth, she wrapped the baby in a towel while she searched for something to cut the umbilical cord. She said the baby was alive and crying at that point but “not that loud. Not like a regular crying at birth, how they normally cry.”

She used a razor to cut the cord and then left the child submerged while she stepped out of the tub, drew the curtain and asked her mother to call an ambulance.

“When I cut the cord, I thought it was going to just be already gone by the time I told anybody,” Salazar told DePalma.

The detective said he specifically asked her if she thought cutting the cord would cause the baby to “bleed out,” and she responded, “Yeah.”

During the interview, Depalma also asked her if she understood that a newborn could not breathe while submerged in water.

“I do now,” she replied.

Salazar told the detective she thought about 5 inches of water remained in the tub, which had become clogged with blood, and that it would drain quickly. DePalma testified that a ring of dried blood around the tub showed that the water had reached a depth of about 6 inches.

The woman did not tell her mother about the baby and was taken by ambulance to Sunrise Hospital, where medical personnel discovered that she recently had given birth.

Officers were dispatched to Salazar’s apartment at 2850 Maryland Parkway, near the Boulevard Mall, about 12:27 a.m. on July 6 to to look for a newborn.

They discovered the infant in the bathroom, and she was pronounced dead at the scene.

According to his testimony, DePalma asked Salazar why she left the baby in the bathtub instead of somewhere else, such as on the bathroom floor.

“I don’t know. I just left it there,” she told him. “And like I was thinking too much about the pain and that I needed to go to the hospital.”

Contact Max Michor at mmichor@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0381. Follow @MaxMichor on Twitter.