VENTURA : Witness Testifies in Baby-Death Case

The day after Francisca Sanchez Jimenez allegedly left her baby to die at the bottom of a portable toilet, she caught a bus for Mexico, a friend of the woman testified Friday.

Jose I. Gonzalez, who used to drive Jimenez to her job as a farm worker, gave the testimony in Ventura County Superior Court, where Jimenez is on trial for murder in the death of the infant known as Baby Boy Sanchez. The infant’s body was discovered July 29 in the toilet where Jimenez gave birth the day before, according to testimony.

Gonzalez said Jimenez used the toilet and then returned to his car, where several farm workers were having lunch. Although she had wrapped a sweat shirt around her waist, he could see blood on Jimenez’s shirt and shoes, Gonzalez said.

“I asked her what had happened to her,” Gonzalez said. “She just said something had come out, like a ball of blood.” Jimenez refused to see a doctor, the witness said, so he took her to her home in Oxnard.

The next morning, Gonzalez said, Jimenez asked him to take her to the bus station in downtown Oxnard. “She was going to go to Tijuana,” he said.

Under cross-examination by Assistant Public Defender Jean L. Farley, Gonzalez admitted that Jimenez had discussed the Mexico trip several days before the incident in the restroom.

Another witness, Francisco Luna, said he was the supervisor at the Saticoy onion field where Jimenez was working the day she gave birth. That afternoon, after the workers had gone home, he was summoned to one of the portable toilets.

The bowl of the unit was filled with blood-stained paper, Luna testified--so much that he could not see the bottom of the toilet. “I wanted to move it but I left it there,” he said. “I felt sick.”

The next day, he moved the toilet to a storage area in Camarillo where portable toilets are emptied. It was there, investigators say, that the body of Baby Boy Sanchez was found.

Jimenez also is charged with the attempted murder of another newborn about 14 months earlier. In that case, she allegedly tried to flush the baby down a toilet at an Oxnard home. The baby survived and is now in foster care.

The trial resumes Monday before Judge Lynn D. Compton.