A mother and her ex-boyfriend were found guilty in the beating death of her 5-year-old son, whose body was discovered in a remote Colorado canyon in 2021.
According to the Bexar County Criminal District Attorney’s Office, Nickolle Aguilar, 28, was sentenced to 15 years in prison on Tuesday, Aug. 6, after accepting a plea agreement in exchange for testifying against her former partner at trial.
The mother had pled guilty to counts of injury to a child with serious bodily harm by omission in her son’s death.
“A parent’s responsibility is to protect her child, but Domenic’s mother said and did nothing as she watched her child die as a result of abuse at the hands of her boyfriend,” District Attorney Joe Gonzales said in a statement obtained by People.
Prosecutors stated she did not try “to intervene in the physical abuse” or “seek adequate medical care” for her battered kid.
Her ex, Daniel Garcia, 29, is scheduled to be sentenced on Wednesday, Aug. 14, on what authorities describe as a “similar charge” to the mother’s. (The district attorney’s office declined to identify the convicted charge. Bexar County District Clerk officials told PEOPLE he is appearing in court for a murder case, however KENS-5 previously reported that in May, a jury found him guilty of damage to a child resulting in death, a charge dropped from the original murder conviction, after hours of discussion. His public defender, Steven Gilmore, did not reply to phone and email questions before publication.
The couple was living with 5-year-old Domenic Patrick Aguilar-Acevedo at The WoodSpring Suites, an extended stay hotel in San Antonio, Texas, when on July 24, 2021, “Daniel struck the body of Domenic with such force that Domenic was thrown against a wall to the hotel room and Domenic bounced off that wall before striking the floor,” according to a summary of events described by an investigator seeking warrants for the couple’s arrest and obtained by PEOPLE.
According to court records, Aguilar later recalled her kid vomiting and her boyfriend going to clean him up “and a short time later told Nickolle that Domenic had died.”
In the early hours of July 25, Garcia was seen in video security footage dragging “what appeared to be the boy’s lifeless body” out of Room 301 and down the hotel staircase, according to the investigator.
The couple, who had reserved the room until July 29 and left early without checking out, then drove to Fraser County, Colo., a 15-hour, almost 1,000-mile excursion, according to detectives.
The boy’s body was disposed of “in a remote location close to their campsite” near Rocky Mountain State Park, according to court records.
Aguilar later told detectives that the couple agreed not to report Dominic’s death to authorities.
They then drove across Mexico’s border to Costa Rica, according to court filings.
According to the investigator’s summary, Aguilar’s mother eventually contacted the FBI when the concerned grandmother found her down in Costa Rica and questioned her about Domenic’s location.
According to court filings, the mother and grandmother returned to the improvised burial place with law enforcement to recover the boy’s body for appropriate burial.
On August 25, 2021, law enforcement rescued the youngster out of a deep gully, still wearing the clothes he had been wearing when he was carried off the motel steps, adding in the narrative summary that he “had been exposed to the elements and animal activity for almost a full month.”
Domenic had experienced chronic “extensive physical abuse” at the hands of his mother’s boyfriend, according to court documents, and the mother eventually acknowledged seeing many attacks in the three weeks preceding his death. She once claimed to have seen her injured son vomit “a black and brown liquid substance.”
However, she did not intervene or abandon her boyfriend because, as she later told investigators, “she was too eager to be in a relationship with a man.”
Aguilar informed authorities that the couple had also considered losing custody of their other children.
Later in August, the couple, who had broken up shortly after the boy’s murder, were arrested separately in Florida.