:max_bytes(150000):strip_icc():focal(749x0:751x2)/Nickolle-Aguilar-Daniel-Garcia-080824-4b24b1c701d74a878724f001db89dd2d.jpg "Mom Did Nothing as Boyfriend Beat Her Son to Death Because She Was 'Too Eager to Be in a Relationship with a Man' (1)")
Content warning: The following article contains disturbing descriptions of child abuse.
A mother and her ex-boyfriend have been found guilty in connection to the beating death of her 5-year-old son, whose body was found in a remote Colorado ravine in 2021.
On Tuesday, Aug. 6, Nickolle Aguilar, 28, who had accepted a plea deal in exchange for testifying at trial against her former boyfriend, was sentenced to 15 years behind bars, according to the Bexar County Criminal District Attorney’s Office.
The mother had pleaded guilty to charges of injury to a child with serious bodily injury by omission in her son’s death.
“A parent’s responsibility is to protect her child, but Domenic’s mother said and did nothing as she watched her child die of abuse at the hands of her boyfriend,” District Attorney Joe Gonzales said in a statement obtained by PEOPLE.
Prosecutors said she neither sought “to intervene in the physical abuse” or “seek adequate medical care” for her battered son.
Her ex, Daniel Garcia, 29, is slated for sentencing on what prosecutors called a “a similar charge” to the mother’s on Wednesday, Aug. 14, according to prosecutors. (The district attorney’s office declined to specify the convicted charge. District Clerk of Bexar County officials tell PEOPLE he is appearing in court for a murder case, but KENS-5 previously reported that within hours of deliberations, a jury found him guilty in May of injury to a child resulting in death, a charge downgraded from the original murder charge. His public defender, Steven Gilmore, did not respond to inquiries made by phone and email in time for publication.)
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The couple was living with 5-year-old Domenic Patrick Aguilar-Acevedo at The WoodSpring Suites, an extended stay hotel in San Antonio, Texas, when 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 striking the floor,” according to a summary of events described by an investigator seeking warrants for the arrests of the couple and obtained by PEOPLE.
Afterward, Aguilar later recalled, per the court documents, that her son had vomited and her boyfriend went to clean him up “and a short time later told Nickolle that Domenic had died,” per the documents.
In the early hours of July 25, Garcia was seen in video surveillance footage described by the investigator as carrying “what appeared to be the lifeless body” of the boy out of Room 301 and down the hotel staircase.
The couple – who had reserved the room until July 29 and left early without checking out – then drove in their car to Fraser County, Colo. – about a 15-hour trip of nearly 1,000 miles, per investigators.
They disposed of the boy's body “in a remote location close to their campsite” near Rocky Mountain State Park, according to the court documents.
And, Aguilar later told investigators, the couple decided together not to report Dominic’s death to authorities.
Then they continued driving, across Mexico’s border to Costa Rica, per the court documents.
Aguilar’s mother ultimately called the FBI, after the worried grandmother tracked Aguilar to Costa Rica and questioned her about Domenic’s whereabouts, according to the investigator’s summary.
Mother and grandmother then returned to the makeshift burial site with law enforcement and recovered the boy’s body for a proper burial, per the court documents.
On Aug. 25, 2021, law enforcement pulled the boy – still in the clothes he had been wearing when he was carried from the motel stairs – out of a deep ravine, noting in the narrative summary that he “had been exposed to the elements and animal activity for almost a full month.”
Domenic had suffered ongoing “extensive physical abuse” at the hands of his mother’s boyfriend, per the court documents, which note that the mother later admitted to witnessing multiple attacks in the three weeks leading up to his death. Once, she said she had watched her injured son vomiting “a black and brown liquid substance.”
But she did not intervene or leave her boyfriend, because, she later told investigators, “she was too eager to be in a relationship with a man.”
Aguilar told investigators that the couple had also discussed the possibility of losing custody of their other children.
Later that August, the couple – who broke up sometime after the boy’s death – were separately arrested in Florida.
