WOODLAND — Fearing that police officers were about to harm her daughter, Aquelin Talamantes drowned the girl with the belief that she was “protecting” her, according to a Davis psychiatrist who evaluated Talamantes two months after the incident.
“She thought the police were going to cut off her head,” said Dr. Captane Thomson, who conducted two interviews with Talamantes at the Yolo County Jail last fall following her arrest in connection with Tatiana Garcia’s death.
The 5-year-old girl’s body was discovered on the afternoon of Sept. 26, 2013, in the trunk of her mother’s car, which Talamantes had driven from Davis to a relative’s apartment complex in Sacramento.
During her discussions with Thomson, a distraught Talamantes referred to the incident as “an accident,” saying that voices told her to drown her daughter in the bathtub of her sister’s Glide Drive home where two Davis police officers had just conducted a welfare check.
“I just listened to them and it happened,” Talamantes said of the voices, according to Thomson, who was hired by the defense to evaluate the defendant. “She expressed she was trying to protect her daughter Tatiana from the police.”
Instead, Talamantes found herself charged with murder and child assault in a case that went to trial this week in Yolo Superior Court. She has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, her defense attorney Sally Fredericksen contending that Talamantes’ mental illness prevented her from having the mind-set to commit premeditated murder.
Prosecutors, however, say Talamantes resented her children and fabricated symptoms of mental illness. Deputy District Attorney Ryan Couzens also has characterized her as a “professional victim” who frequently blamed others for her troubles.
There was some evidence of that in Thomson’s report, which noted that Talamantes said her relatives “should have helped her care for the children … but they were too busy.” Talamantes also blamed friends for failing to realize she had been acting strangely and doing something about it.
“I should have been in the hospital,” Talamantes said, according to Thomson. She also described spending time in a Sacramento County mental health facility but had missed follow-up appointments and couldn’t afford the $41 co-payment for mood-stabilizing medications. As a result, she had been off them for two months at the time of the drowning.
While Thomson formulated an opinion regarding Talamantes’ mental state, his testimony as a prosecution witness Wednesday was limited to statements the woman made regarding the day of her daughter’s death.
Talamantes disclosed that her daughter drowned “face up” in the bathtub, said Thomson, who is expected to offer more wide-ranging testimony in the case next week. “It was quick,” the defendant said of her daughter’s death.
Indeed, it may have taken as little as 15 seconds to drown the 36-pound, 2 1/2-foot-tall girl, according to the forensic pathologist who conducted Tatiana’s autopsy the following day.
Tatiana likely panicked when her mother held her underwater, and as a result was unable to hold her breath for long, Dr. Gregory Reiber told the six-man, six-woman jury hearing the case.
“The next phase is actual inhalation of water,” which “produces a complex number of physiological changes in the body,” Reiber said. This can include heart and lung failure, as well as seizures as the brain is deprived of oxygen.
A fresh bite mark on Tatiana’s tongue may have been the result of such a seizure, but other than that and some asphyxiation-induced hemorrhaging to the girl’s inner eyelid, there were no other signs of injuries to Tatiana’s body, Reiber testified. He placed her time of death at between 10 a.m. and noon on Sept. 26, several hours before her body was found.
With jurors allowed to ask their own questions of witnesses in Judge Stephen Mock’s courtroom, one juror asked whether it was possible that Tatiana was still breathing when Talamantes allegedly wrapped her body in a blanket and plastic trash bag, then placed it in the trunk of her car.
It’s remotely possible, Reiber replied, but not very likely.
Even if unconscious yet still breathing on her own when put into the trunk, the incident still would be “a near-drowning that is allowed to progress into death” due to the lack of medical intervention, Reiber said. “The cause of death ultimately is the drowning.”
Testimony in the case resumed today in Mock’s courtroom.
— Reach Lauren Keene at lkeene@davisenterprise.net or 530-747-8048. Follow her on Twitter at @laurenkeene