The Ashley Newton Murder Case

     Police in Livermore, California, a suburban community 45 miles east of San Francisco, received calls, at ten-thirty on the morning of Saturday, April 26, 2014 regarding a disturbed woman in the 4,400-acre Del Valle Regional Park. The woman, according to the callers, was screaming as she repeatedly rammed her Honda Civil into a rock wall at the end of Arroyo Road in the remote Camp Arroyo section of the sprawling park.

     Officers with the Livermore Police Department, accompanied by California Highway Patrol (CHP) officers, responded to the badly damaged Honda which sat in a ditch off Arroyo Road. The female driver had left the scene and her whereabouts at the time were unknown. Officers noticed an empty car seat in the back of the damaged vehicle.

     Two hours after the police calls, off-duty Livermore Chief of Police Mike Harris, his wife and their two daughters, returned to their car after a hike in the Camp Arroyo section of the park. Earlier that morning Harris and his family had driven past the wrecked Honda. The chief didn't stop because there were several officers already at the scene.

     Shortly after the chief's daughters climbed into the family vehicle, a young woman wearing a sweatshirt and jeans caked in blood approached the Harris family. In her arms she carried a blond-haired, 7-month-old boy dressed in Cookie Monster diapers and a blue striped pullover. The child was also covered in blood. The distraught woman handed the boy to the chief. "Take him! Take him!" she yelled before climbing into the car with the chief's daughters.

     The police chief assumed that the woman and her son had been injured in the nearby wrecked Honda. He alerted officers and paramedic personnel who were down the road investigating the accident. A member of the emergency crew, shortly after starting CPR on the boy, realized that he was dead. The child had been stabbed to death.

     Police officers escorted the woman, 23-year-old Ashley Newton, to the Santa Rita Jail where she was booked on suspicion of murder. Originally from North Carolina, Newton resided in San Jose. Before moving to San Jose she had lived in the bay area town of Fremont, California.

     On Sunday, April 27, 2014, detectives questioned Newton at the Santa Rita Jail. She said she had stabbed her son with a pocket knife. (The bloody weapon had been recovered from the park.) Sounding paranoid and detached from reality, Newton was unable to articulate a motive for killing her son.

     On the day of Ashley Newton's police interview, detectives in San Jose interviewed the dead child's father. He said he had last spoken to Newton the day before she stabbed their son to death. She had been suffering from depression, he said. A police spokesperson announced that toxicology tests would determine if drugs or alcohol had played a role in the killing.

     On Monday, April 28, 2014, an Orange County prosecutor charged Ashley Newton with first-degree murder. The judge denied her bail and ordered psychiatric tests.

     As of July 2019, Ashley Newton has not been tried or convicted for the murder of her child. [At least I couldn't find any reportage of this. I'm guessing that she hasn't been tried because the court has ruled that she is not mentally competent to stand trial.].

     Numerous studies have shown that while women commit only 14 percent of violent crimes in the United States, they are responsible for about half of the parental murders. A vast majority of women who kill their children are extremely mentally ill.