Judge Sets Bond At $250,000 For Palm Coast Student Accused Of Burying Newborn In Backyard

Updating note: Demegillo posted bond on March 12 and was released at 4:43 p.m.

Circuit Judge Dawn Nichols set bond at $250,000 for Anne Mae Demegillo, the 20-year-old Palm Coast college student accused of watching her newborn die and burying her in the backyard of her Florida Park Drive house last week. She is charged with aggravated manslaughter, a second degree felony. The charge could change when it is filed by the State Attorney’s office. The baby’s gestational age was between 30 and 36 weeks, the medical examiner determined. 

It was Demegillo’s first court appearance since her arrest on March 6 (aside from a first appearance by zoom on March 9). Diminutive, expressionless, utterly silent, she sat at the edge of her seat next to her attorney, not once looking back toward the gallery. Four members of her family, all wearing shades, sat a few rows behind her. 

She did not address the court. The court did not ask her questions, nor greet her, as is sometimes the case between judges and defendants. But she was only one of several defendants appearing before Nichols for various reasons, precluding any extraneous civilities. She did not react when the judge announced her decision, and gave no indication that she was aware of the meaning of bond or some of the conditions. To secure her pretrial release, her family would have to put up $25,000 in cash and back up the full bond with some form of security. Families typically do so by using their property to that effect. 

Should Demegillo post bond, the conditions of her pretrial release will be little short of house arrest: ankle-locked GPS monitoring at all time, no traveling outside of Flagler County, no contact with anyone under 18, which precludes attending classes where some students may still be minors, no contact with witnesses in the case, no drugs or alcohol consumption, weekly urinalysis tests. 

Fortunately for Demegillo, her parents are not on that list: it is to hide the pregnancy and the birth from them that Demegillo allowed the baby to die and buried her, she told Flagler County Sheriff’s Detective Shannon Smith, and it was partly because she was busy cleaning up the bathroom of blood, where she had given birth to the baby in the toilet, that the baby was left to die. She did not want to leave any indications of anything amiss.

When Smith, who testified at today’s bond hearing, asked her what she would have done had the baby lived, Demegillo said: “‘I would have been fucked.’ Those were her exact words,”  Smith said. 

What she had attempted to dissimulate from her parents, and what she had denied to herself while she was pregnant–the detective said she had become aware of the pregnancy from missing several periods, but was “in denial”–is now known the world over and as far out as her ancestral Philippines, becoming one of the most notorious cases ever prosecuted in Flagler County. It has no precedent here.

Demegillo was born in 2003–the year her parents bought the house on Florida Park Drive–and is a U.S. citizen. Her parents are from the Philippines. One of the conditions the judge set for Demegillo’s release on bond is to first turn in her passport–an extraordinary order that reflects some trepidation over Demegillo leaving the country, even though Nichols stressed that she has no criminal record, that she cooperated with law enforcement, and that whatever efforts she took to dissimulate her acts were not that successful. 

The case is being prosecuted by Assistant State Attorney Andrew Urbanak. Demegillo is represented by Michael Politis. 

Politis asked Smith if she’d heard of severe postpartum psychosis and severe postpartum depression. She had. “Are you aware that those people that are stricken with that could suffer from delusions or hallucinations?” Politis asked. She was aware.  He referred to the M’Naghten Rule, a nearly two centuries old British legal standard used in insanity defenses that Politics explained as “the proposition you commit a crime, but you don’t know it’s wrong.” 

Politis, who had seen the interview, described his client to the detective as “not a space cadet, but something along those lines, where she wasn’t in reality. She’s answering your questions, but you could see that she was a little off.”

“I don’t know that I would agree with that,” the detective said.

Smith’s testimony, when questioned by the prosecutor, amounted to a chronological reconstruction, the first detailed account of the incident since last week’s revelations.

The incident began, unknowingly to the world but to Demegillo, on March 5. Deputies arrived at the Florida Park Drive house on March 6 at 4 a.m., after Demegillo sent social media messages to a friend about having given birth and buried the child. She had given birth on March 5, over a several-hour struggle from 2 a.m. to sunrise. She readily answered questions by detectives after agreeing to go to the Sheriff’s Operations Center, where Smith and Sgt. George Hristakopoulos, who leads the Major Case Unit, interviewed her. 

She began to have cramps on March 5 and at one point felt the need to push something out. She went to the bathroom, where the baby eventually came out, dropping in the toilet bowl. “The baby’s head was downwards in the toilet, and she left it there as she was cleaning up the blood, because she was concerned that her mother would find out what had happened,” Smith said.

“She advised she left the child in the toilet,” Smith said (law enforcement officers and documents typically use the word “advise” for “said”), “knowing that its nose was partially submerged under the water, and at some point, once the baby had stopped moving, she described it as being limp and no longer breathing, she then wrapped the baby in a towel and put it in a duffel bag and then stored the duffel bag in her closet.”

Demegillo then proceeded with her normal activities, going to classes in Daytona and taking part in a  theatrical production in New Smyrna Beach. When she returned late that night, she buried the child, though she could not dig deep and her arms got sore from shoveling dirt. The medical examiner’s preliminary findings attribute the baby’s death to drowning. “Hemorrhaging on the head and buttocks of the baby,” Smith said, “indicated the baby was alive at the time of birth.”

Had Smith’s testimony taken place before a jury, Demegillo’s defense would have had difficulties countering what Demeglillo said. If it gets that far, it won;t be the detective’s testimony that the jury will hear, but Demegillo’s own video recorded interview. It is often defendants’ own words that prove the most incrimination, or the most difficult to avoid jurors’ severity.

“During the interview, it was asked if she at some point, if she had hoped that this was the outcome, the baby would have died,” Smith testified. “She said, ‘a little bit.’ And then she waited until the baby was no longer crying, breathing, and it was limp before she removed it from the toilet.” Demegillo said she had no plan if the baby survived. She knew she had options–call 911, go to the hospital, drop off the baby at a fire station, tell her mother or her boyfriend what had happened. “She said she didn’t want to draw any attention and she didn’t want anybody to know,” Smith said.

“And did she, in fact, tell you she wanted it to be over and done with?” the prosecutor asked Smith.

“She did,” Smith said.

Did you ask whether she would have done anything differently?

“I did ask her if, knowing what she knew now, during her interview, if she could go back 48 hours and change how she handled the outcome of this if she would change it. She said she doesn’t believe that she would,” Smith testified. There had been no question that the baby was alive, and that she watched the baby die.

Strikingly elegiac though it was, Urbanak had made the unconvincing argument to the court that Demegillo should be denied bond and stay in jail through the disposition of the case for two reasons: destruction of evidence, and “the threat of harm to the community.” 

“This is a child who took her first and her last breath in a toilet bowl as her mother looked down on her, hoping that she would die,” Urbanak argued to Nichols. “The defendant’s own intentional, gross and flagrant actions caused the death of her infant child. In this case, the state has grave concerns for anyone else in the community, if that’s the level of care this young woman shows to her own flesh and blood when she’s the only person that can protect that child and save that child and give that child an opportunity to live. How can the community trust somebody to exercise any level of care to any person, known or unknown, when that’s how she treated her baby girl? The defendant demonstrated unconscionable indifference to the human life of her own child, putting her own interest in her own life before that of her child. She made the choice to not want to bother her parents with what was going on, not draw attention to it, so that her mother would know, so that she also could go about her life, going to school, going to a play as the dead body of her infant child sat in a duffel bag in a closet in her bedroom. That is not the type of person that should be in the community around other individuals, where we expect her to show some level of care to others, when that’s how she treats again, her own flesh and blood.”

Politis was no less mournful, but he didn’t buy the hyperbole of community danger. “We know what happened. We just don’t know why,” he said. “She has no prior criminal record, not even a parking ticket. She’s been nothing but a joy to her parents that are here, her aunts. A normal young kid who went to Matanzas High, going to Daytona State, graduates in May with an AA degree, going to UCF for some kind of forensic degree, no mental health history whatsoever. This is apparent violent behavior. There’s no question. But is she a danger to the community? She’s not going to commit a crime to somebody else. She’s not going to be introduced in the public and become a menace to society. There are people out in the community now that are on probation that have committed a crime and are still at large, and those that will have the propensity to commit a crime. I just want her to go home have the comfort of her family.”

She had been on suicide watch at the jail but after a couple of evaluation was downgraded and brought into the general population, Politis said. “I don’t know how long she will survive,” he said. There will be numerous psychological evaluations. He conceded that it is a “horrific episode.” But he doesn’t see her as a danger.  “I’m talking to her and I detect something,” Politis said. “I have no forensic psychology expertise, but I’ve been around a lot of people that have committed murders and things of that nature. She doesn’t have that spark. She doesn’t have that in her eyes.”