Te’Lea Jefferson, a 28-year-old Florida resident, has been handed a life sentence after entering a no contest plea to charges of first-degree murder and aggravated child abuse. The charges are linked to a 2020 incident in which Jefferson fatally attacked her girlfriend’s 3-year-old son, Miguel, using a tire iron. She then delayed seeking medical help for the child for over three hours, during which time the child likely succumbed to his injuries.
The court was informed that Jefferson transported the unresponsive child to the hospital around 7 p.m. on October 19, 2020. Upon arrival, the boy’s body temperature was a mere 88 degrees, and he had sustained severe trauma to his face and head. He was declared dead shortly after arrival, leading hospital staff to alert the Tallahassee Police Department.
Jefferson, who resided with her girlfriend, Miguel, and his 6-year-old sibling, initially asserted that the boy had fallen and hit the toilet while brushing his teeth, causing the porcelain to shatter. However, the police observed multiple deep lacerations on his head and face, along with a nearly severed finger. These injuries, along with others in various stages of healing throughout his body, were inconsistent with a fall.
Jefferson later confessed to detectives that she had been looking after Miguel while his mother was at work and his sibling was at school. She maintained that the boy fell and hit the toilet after she told him to get down from the sink and momentarily left the bathroom. She insisted that the lacerations were caused by the shattered toilet.
However, her timeline was scrutinized by the police. If she had taken Miguel to the hospital immediately after his injuries, they would have arrived around 4 p.m., not 7 p.m. Confronted with this discrepancy and the fact that the boy’s injuries did not align with a fall, Jefferson admitted to striking him with a tire iron.
She informed the police that she had become irate when Miguel refused to climb down from the sink. She grabbed a tire iron from a toolkit and threw it at him, hitting him in the side of the face. The tire iron also hit the toilet, causing it to shatter. She confessed to hitting the boy three or four times in total.
Jefferson also admitted that she believed Miguel was already dead when she took him to the hospital. She was arrested and has remained in jail since. Before the plea deal, prosecutors had been pursuing the death penalty.
Following the determination that both children had been subjected to prior abuse, the Department of Children and Families has since taken custody of Miguel’s sibling.