A woman and her ex-boyfriend were both found guilty of beating to death their 5-year-old son. The boy’s body was found in a remote Colorado ravine in 2021.
According to the Bexar County Criminal District Attorney’s Office, Nickolle Aguilar, 28, was given 15 years in prison on Tuesday, August 6. She had agreed to a plea deal in return for testifying against her ex-boyfriend at trial.
It was alleged that the mother caused her son’s death by neglecting to take care of him, which she admitted to.
DA Joe Gonzales said in a statement received by PEOPLE that a parent must protect her child, but Domenic’s mother said and did nothing as she watched her child die from abuse at the hands of her boyfriend.
The prosecutors said she didn’t try to “intervene in the physical abuse” or “get her son the medical care he needed” when he was being abused.
The 29-year-old ex-boyfriend of the mother is set to be sentenced on Wednesday, August 14, on what authorities called “a similar charge” to the mother’s. The district attorney’s office wouldn’t say what the guilty charge was. According to the District Clerk of Bexar County, he is in court for a murder case. However, KENS-5 stated that in May, within hours of deliberations, a jury found him guilty of injury to a child resulting in death, which was less serious than the original murder charge. Steve Gilmore, who is his public defender, did not answer the phone or email messages that were left in time for publishing.
The couple was staying at The WoodSpring Suites, an extended-stay hotel in San Antonio, Texas, with 5-year-old Domenic Patrick Aguilar-Acevedo. 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 hitting the floor,” according to an investigator’s summary of events that was obtained by PEOPLE. The investigator was looking for warrants to arrest the couple.
As the court records show, Aguilar later remembered that her son had thrown up and that her boyfriend had gone to clean him up “and a short time later told Nickolle that Domenic had died.”
The investigator said that in the early hours of July 25, Garcia was seen carrying “what appeared to be the lifeless body” of the boy out of Room 301 and down the hotel stairs. This was caught on video surveillance.
Police say the couple booked the room until July 29 but left early without checking out. They then drove their car to Fraser County, Colorado, which is about a 15-hour, nearly 1,000-mile trip.
The court papers say that they buried the boy’s body “in a remote location close to their campsite” near Rocky Mountain State Park.
And, Aguilar later told police, the couple chose together not to tell the police about Dominic’s death.
According to court papers, they kept driving, this time crossing the border into Costa Rica from Mexico.
According to the investigator’s report, Aguilar’s mother finally called the FBI after her worried grandmother tracked her to Costa Rica and asked her about Domenic’s whereabouts.
According to the court papers, the boy’s mother and grandmother then went back to the makeshift grave site with police to get his body for a proper burial.
The boy was pulled out of a deep ravine by police on August 25, 2021. He was still wearing the clothes he was wearing when he was taken down the motel stairs. The narrative summary said that the boy “had been exposed to the elements and animal activity for almost a full month.”
According to the court papers, Domenic had been subjected to “extensive physical abuse” by his mother’s boyfriend for a long time. His mother later admitted that she had seen multiple attacks happen in the three weeks before he died. She once said that she had seen her hurt son throw up “a black and brown liquid substance.”
She later told police that she didn’t leave her boyfriend or step in because “she was too eager to be in a relationship with a man.”
Investigators were told by Aguilar that the couple had also talked about losing control of their other children.
In late August of that year, the couple, who had broken up after the boy’s death, were both caught in Florida.