For abandoning a dead baby inside a Houston gas station restroom last year, a 27-year-old Texas mother will serve a number of years in prison. Diana Guadalupe Zavala Lopez entered a guilty plea to one count of tampering with evidence—a human corpse—and one count of tampering/fabricating physical evidence with the intent to obstruct an investigation.
According to court records, Harris County District Judge Kristin M. Guiney on Monday sentenced her to four years in a state correctional facility.
In addition, Guiney gave Zavala Lopez credit for 489 days of time already spent.
In August 2023, Zavala Lopez was arrested by U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents at a bus stop in Brownsville, Texas, the biggest city in the U.S. part of the Lower Rio Grande Valley.
Mexican native Zavala Lopez was characterized as a “migrant who overstayed her visitor visa and was successfully taken into custody” by federal authorities in a news release.
She is described in the release as “a homicide suspect attempting to flee to Mexico,” however the defendant was never charged with homicide.
A Houston Police Department representative after her arrest stated that the investigation is still ongoing and that the agency will “probably interview her again to get more details.” The spokesperson also emphasized that the only charge was the one count of evidence tampering mentioned on the Twitter account.
“We still need to talk to her,” a public information officer for HPD stated. “Beyond that, the remainder of the investigation will determine it.”
The extra accusation of tampering with evidence was later brought against her.
A probable cause document states that on April 2, 2023, a customer went to the restroom in the middle of the night at a Shell gas station in southwest Houston.
The child was discovered inside the toilet there. By then, paramedics from the Houston Fire Department concluded the girl had been deceased for more than an hour.
Before the newborn was discovered dead, police uploaded video on the department’s YouTube channel that showed a “person of interest”—later identified as Zavala Lopez—leaving the gas station.
The woman is seen exiting her car, which is parked at one of the pumps, and entering the filling station through the front door in the snippet of film that seems to have been altered.
As she walks into the store, the camera pans in on her face. The same woman is shown in the video getting back into the car and heading out into the night. Three separate still photos of the desired woman taken at the moment she entered are shown at the end of the movie.
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The woman on the camera was in the gas station for around fifteen minutes before she departed, according to HPD Homicide Detective Calab Bowling, who made this announcement at a news conference announcing the efforts to release the video in an attempt to get the public’s assistance in the case.
Browning later clarified that witness testimony corroborated her account of events, saying, “No one else went inside that bathroom, and [the newborn] was not there when she walked in before.” “She seems to have given birth in the bathroom.”