Beaming with one arm tied through her boyfriend’s arm and the other strategically placed in front of her stomach, Alexee Trevizo is the epitome of happiness in her prom photos.
But unbeknownst to the photographer who shot them, and perhaps even the other teens around her, the 19-year-old was hiding a dark secret.
Just 12 weeks earlier, she secretly gave birth to a baby boy in a hospital bathroom, dumping his tiny body in a garbage can wrapped in plastic bags.
The boy died before hospital staff found him with the bag ‘sucked up’ to his face.
A babyfaced cheerleader herself, Alexee insisted she never knew she was pregnant. She was allowed to return home from the hospital while police conducted their investigation.
In the last week of April, when her son would be three months old, she donned a mini dress and sneakers to dance the night away with Devyn Fierro, her “almost three-year-old” boyfriend.
Alexee Trevizo and her boyfriend Devyn Fierro at Artesia High School Prom on April 22 – 12 weeks after she gave birth to their newborn son and stuffed him in the trash in a hospital bathroom. She was arrested on May 10 and is now charged with murder
Devyn has not been charged with any crime. Alexee will return to court in September
The couple had nothing in the world to worry about as they walked the red carpet rolled out by Artesia High School for the senior class.
Melody Smith is the local photographer who took their picture.
She didn’t know at the time what Alexee and Devyn – who was being interviewed at the hospital – were hiding.
‘I had no idea [the baby] but when I looked back at the pictures I remembered her because I remember how unusual I thought it was for her to wear such a short dress.
She held her friend’s arm, they were big smiles. They were excited to be at the prom.
“You would never have known,” Smith, who grew up in Artesia and went to the same high school, tells DailyMail.com.
The couple kept largely to themselves during “the walk,” like most other young couples, she said.
“It wasn’t until after and then that there was any retaliation about her being present that I realized what had happened,” Melody adds, referring to Alexee’s alleged murder of the baby.
Videos taken on Jan. 6 — three weeks before she gave birth — show Alexee Trevizo, 19, cheering with a huge baby bump. On January 27, she secretly gave birth and dumped the baby’s body in a hospital garbage can. Now she is charged with murder
Today, the 19-year-old’s reality is a lot less cheery than it was on that spring evening in April.
She awaits her first trial on charges of murder and tampering with evidence, and is unable to leave her home at certain times of the day.
She was allowed to return to school to graduate, but did not attend the ceremony with her peers.
By then she had been arrested and imprisoned in the local jail.
What will be at the heart of the trial is whether Alexee intended to kill the baby – or killed the baby – or if he was stillborn.
In her initial interviews with police, she insisted he was “dead” when he “fell out of her.”
She had gone to the hospital with her mother, Rosa Rodriguez, on January 27 complaining of back pain.
Around 2 am she told the nurses that she had to go to the toilet.
She was filmed by hospital surveillance cameras running down the hallway clinging to her butt.
January 27: Alexee runs to the bathroom at Artesia General Hospital to give birth
January 27: Trevizo and her mother, Rosa Rodriguez, in the hospital. They both insisted they didn’t know she was pregnant when police confronted them about finding the baby’s body in a garbage can
Devyn Fierro and his mother Melanie are shown in hospital on January 27. He nodded when police asked if he was the father, and told police he and Alexee had been together for nearly three years.
The interview took place on January 27 at 4:22 am, about two hours after Alexee gave birth
After locking herself in the bathroom, she gave birth to the full-term baby boy, separating the umbilical cord in a way that nurses said resembled how an animal might tear it.
Alexee then wrapped the boy in a plastic bag and put him in the bin, before calmly emerging to go back to her room.
When questioned by a nurse in the hallway about all the blood in the room, she said it was “her period.”
Once back in the treatment room, she was confronted by staff.
She denied knowing she was pregnant – just like her mother – and cried.
Her mother’s first words to her were, “Lexi, I told you about this.”