When Giving Birth Leads to Psychosis, Then to Infanticide
In May 2013, Kimberlynn Bolanos, 21, told her boyfriend she needed to take a shower. She placed her five-month-old son, Isaac, into his carrier and shut the door to the bathroom of a Chicago motel room. After 30 minutes, the boyfriend knocked on the bathroom door. He pushed the door open and saw his son was bloody and unconscious.
The boyfriend ran from the room screaming, “She killed my baby.” The motel receptionist called 911. Chicago police couldn’t open the bathroom door and used an axe to break it down. Both mother and son were on the floor, covered in blood. Bolanos had slashed Isaac’s throat, and stabbed him almost 30 times in the head, neck, and chest. She also stabbed herself multiple times in a suicide attempt. Bolanos recovered from her wounds and gave a video statement to investigators in which she described having premonitions about something bad happening to her baby. She feared the state would take Isaac away because she smoked crack cocaine.
During the 2016 bench trial, she told the judge she suffered from bipolar disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder. She also admitted to substance abuse. The judge acknowledged her mental-health status during the sentencing and said he believed the murder was a onetime incident. He found her “guilty but mentally ill” and gave her the minimum penalty of 38 years in prison. The judge urged Bolanos to live a productive life during her incarceration.
Bolanos’s sentence for
