Houston, TX– A 27-year-old woman from Texas has been sentenced to several years in prison for abandoning a deceased infant in a gas station restroom in Houston last year. On Monday, Harris County District Judge Kristin M. Guiney sentenced Diana Guadalupe Zavala Lopez to four years in a state correctional facility after her guilty plea to one count of tampering with evidence related to a human corpse and one count of tampering or fabricating physical evidence to obstruct an investigation.
Guiney acknowledged Zavala Lopez for having served 489 days already.
Agents from U.S. Customs and Border Protection took Zavala Lopez into custody in August 2023 at a bus station located in Brownsville, Texas, the largest city in the U.S. section of the Lower Rio Grande Valley.
Federal authorities have identified Zavala Lopez as a Mexican national who overstayed her visitor visa and has now been taken into custody. The announcement refers to her as “a homicide suspect trying to escape to Mexico,” yet no homicide charges were ever brought against the defendant.
After her arrest, a representative from the Houston Police Department informed Law&Crime that they would probably conduct another interview to gather further information. They emphasized that the sole charge at this time is one count of evidence tampering mentioned on the Twitter account, while the investigation remains active.
“We still have to speak with her,” an HPD public information officer said. “Beyond that it depends on the rest of the investigation.”
She faced an added charge for tampering with evidence.
A customer visited a Shell gas station in southwest Houston to use the restroom during the night on April 2, 2023, as detailed in a probable cause affidavit. The child was discovered in the toilet. Paramedics from the Houston Fire Department found that the girl had been deceased for more than an hour by that point.
Authorities shared video on their YouTube channel featuring a “person of interest” — later identified as Zavala Lopez — exiting the gas station prior to the discovery of the deceased newborn.
The video shows a woman exiting her car, parked at a pump, and walking into the filling station. As she walks into the store, the camera focuses closely on her face. The scene shifts to the same woman as she returns to her car and drives off into the darkness. The video concludes with three distinct still images of the sought-after woman, captured as she arrived.
At a press conference, HPD Homicide Detective Calab Bowling shared that the woman captured in the video spent about 15 minutes at the gas station before departing.
“No one else went inside that bathroom, and [the newborn] was not there when she walked in before,” Browning said, clarifying later that witness statements also supported that understanding of events. “It appears that she gave birth in the restroom.”
Officials have not disclosed the identity of the child or the reason for their passing.