Texas mom arrested for murder in death of 15-month-old ‘intentionally’ left in hot car for over 2 hours: Police
The booking photo for Vanessa Esquivel. Frisco Police Department
(FRISCO, Texas) — A Texas mother has been arrested for murder after her 15-month-old was left in a hot car for over two hours and died, police said.
Police said 27-year-old Vanessa Esquivel “intentionally” left the child in a vehicle while at work on Aug. 16 in Frisco.
“At that time, detectives believe Esquivel intentionally left her 15-month-old child for over two hours in a vehicle she knew did not have working air conditioning with an outside temperature of at least 95 degrees,” the Frisco Police Department said in a press release Thursday announcing the arrest.
Frisco police officers responded to a hospital in Plano on Aug. 16, after local police alerted them to an infant death that likely occurred in Frisco.
Officers learned that the child had been left in a car for over two hours, after the child’s mother arrived at her workplace in Frisco around 2 p.m. that day, police said.
Detectives obtained a warrant for Esquivel’s arrest for first-degree murder, and Dallas police arrested her on Aug. 20, police said. She has since been booked into the Collin County Jail, where she remains held on $250,000 bond, online jail records show.
If convicted, Esquivel faces between five years and up to life in prison, police said. It is unclear if she has an attorney at this time.
(WASHINGTON) — Kilmar Abrego Garcia is expected to appear before immigration authorities on Monday morning in Baltimore, where he faces the possibility of being detained again.
Less than 24 hours after being released from criminal custody in Tennessee on Friday, Immigration Customs Enforcement notified Abrego Garcia’s attorneys that he may be deported to Uganda and ordered him to report to their office in Maryland.
The notification from ICE came after Abrego Garcia rejected a plea deal to be deported to Costa Rica in exchange for pleading guilty to human smuggling charges and remaining in jail, according to a court filing from his attorneys.
In the filing, Abrego Garcia’s attorneys accused the federal government of trying to force their client to accept a guilty plea or face deportation to East Africa.
It is unclear if Abrego Garcia will be put into immigration custody on Monday.
In July, U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis ordered the government to “restore Abrego Garcia to his ICE Order of Supervision out of the Baltimore Field Office.”
But Xinis also said that if the government intends to deport Abrego Garcia to a third country, it needs to provide 72 hours’ notice.
The order allowed President Donald Trump’s administration to initiate “lawful immigration proceedings” when Abrego Garcia returned to Maryland.
The immigration proceedings may or may not include “lawful arrest, detention and eventual removal,” Xinis said in July.
(CHARLOTTE COUNTY, N.C.) — A teenager from North Carolina has been missing for nearly a week after vacationing in Florida and trying to reconnect with relatives, the Charlotte County Sheriff’s Office said.
Giovanni Pelletier, an 18-year-old who is described as “smart, kind and full of life,” disappeared early last Friday “under deeply troubling and suspicious circumstances,” according to the family’s GoFundMe page.
Pelletier was visiting Englewood, Florida, with his mother and her fiance and wanted to reconnect with relatives from his biological father’s family, his aunt, Desiree Pelletier, told ABC News. While he was unable to see his father, who is incarcerated, he made plans to see three of his cousins on that side of the family, his aunt said.
With only a few days left in his vacation, Pelletier’s cousins picked him up at approximately 1:30 a.m. on Aug. 1 to take him on the three-hour drive to their house in Mims, Florida, his aunt said. His mother was planning on picking him up the next day, according to Desiree Pelletier.
But within 25 minutes of leaving, he sent his mom a text: “Help me,” his aunt said.
That was the last time his mother heard from him, according to his aunt. He also sent messages pleading for help to his grandfather and another aunt, Desiree Pelletier noted.
“Somewhere along the ride, something happened,” his aunt said.
The next morning, the teen’s mother saw the messages and missed phone calls from her son, could not get ahold of him and immediately contacted authorities, Desiree Pelletier said. She also reached out to the cousins who were with Pelletier, who said the group had been smoking marijuana, which is when the teen began to panic and pull out a knife, Pelletier’s aunt noted.
But his aunt said that alleged behavior “is not Gio” and that it does “not align” with who he is.
The cousins also told police that Pelletier “began to act erratically before exiting the vehicle,” according to a statement from the Charlotte County Sheriff’s Office.
His family said he was “abandoned on the side of the road in Bardenton, Florida,” with his backpack and phone discovered in the area by a truck driver the same day he disappeared. Bardenton is about an hour away from Englewood by car.
His aunt said the family does not believe this is a run-away and that “something is not told right.”
“It doesn’t make sense. Why would he say ‘Help me’ three different times to three people?” his aunt said.
Since then, the family has been continuing their search for Giovanni Pelletier, with officials saying they have received “many, many tips that unfortunately turn out to be inaccurate.”
“We love him and want him home and we just want him to be OK. As a family, we can’t function normally. We’re not doing well right now. We just want him home,” his aunt told ABC News as she held back tears.
As of Thursday, the sheriff’s office said in a statement to ABC News they “do not have any updates on this investigation and continue to ask anyone with information to come forward.”
The family is currently offering a reward of $10,000 for information leading to the teen’s whereabouts, his aunt said. ABC News
(MADBURY, N.H.) — Four members of a family, including two children, were found dead in a New Hampshire home and police are investigating the incident as a possible murder-suicide, authorities said.
A toddler was found alive and uninjured in the home in Madbury, a small town in the state’s Seacoast region northwest of Portsmouth, according to a statement from the New Hampshire Attorney General’s Office.
Police officers discovered the bodies of two adults and two children around 8:21 p.m. on Monday after a 911 caller reported that several people were deceased inside the home, according to the statement.
“Each of the deceased family members appears to have suffered gunshot wounds, and were pronounced dead at the scene,” according to the statement from authorities.
The names of the deceased family members are being withheld by law enforcement pending autopsies scheduled for Wednesday by the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner and notification of next of kin, officials said.
Investigators said there is no known threat to the public.
“I think investigators still have probably more questions than they have answers,” Assistant Attorney General Ben Agati told ABC affiliate station WMUR in Manchester, New Hampshire. “One of the biggest questions they have right now is motive. Why? And I think that’s probably one of the more difficult things that they are trying to grasp, to understand how this came to be and to be able to be more definitive and to understand what the sequence of events was like inside that house.”
