A Miami woman claimed two carjackers kidnapped her young son with autism after she tried to drown him twice, though witnesses were only able to save him the first time, officials said Saturday.
Patricia Ripley, 45, is now facing attempted and premeditated a murder charges in the death of 9-year-old Alejandro Ripley, Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle told The Associated Press. She is being held without bail; jail records don’t list an attorney.
Alejandro was nonverbal; his body was found in a canal near a golf course close to where he was last seen late Thursday.
Ripley apparently tried to drown her son an hour earlier at another canal, but nearby residents heard yelling and rescued him, Fernandez Rundle told AP. Then, Ripley drove her son to another canal.
“Unfortunately, when she took him to the second canal and there was no one there,” Fernandez Rundle said. “She tried it once, and people rescued him. He was alive. He could have stayed alive. She intended, from all the facts of the case, to kill him.”
Ripley initially told authorities two black men in a light blue sedan cut her off while she was driving, blocked her van and demanded drugs. When she insisted that she didn’t have any drugs, one man took her cellphone and grabbed her son before they drove off, she had claimed.
Her story prompted Florida officials to issue a statewide Amber Alert for Alejandro.
But Ripley finally confessed after police confronted her with witness statements and surveillance footage of her first attempt at pushing Alejandro into the water, according to AP.
An arrest affidavit states Ripley recanted her story and admitted she drove to another site and led the boy into the canal, telling police that “he’s going to be in a better place.”
Fernandez Rundle pointed out that Alejandro couldn’t have told his initial rescuers that his mother tried to kill him.
“He can’t say anything to his rescuers. We talk about children being voiceless. This is another level of voicelessness. He was incapable of saying that ‘mommy put me in the water.’”
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