A 69-year-old woman will not face criminal charges after the remains of her four babies were found frozen solid in her South Boston apartment — and the decision is sparking confusion and outrage.
Police made the gruesome and bizarre discovery on November 22, 2022, based on a tip from family members of the babies’ mother, Alexis Aldamir. The bodies of two boys and two girls had been tucked into shoe boxes that were wrapped in tin foil and then stashed in a freezer for decades. DNA testing determined all four siblings were the biological children of Aldamir, the owner of the apartment, and an unnamed man who died in 2011.
“All of the babies were full term, which means they were determined to be between 37 and 40 weeks of gestational age. All four had their umbilical cords attached, and the two females had their placentas attached,” said Suffolk County District Attorney Kevin Hayden in a press release, who noted that there were no signs of trauma or “obvious” injuries to the babies.
“This investigation, which is one of the most complex, unusual, and perplexing that this office has ever encountered, is now complete,” Hayden said, adding that there are still many questions surrounding these deaths that “will likely never be answered.”
Many are confused by the decision to close a case with so many unanswered questions and are pointing out a double standard.
The treatment of Aldamir stands in stark contrast, for instance, to the case of Brittany Watts, a Black woman from Warren, Ohio, who was arrested and slapped with felony charges — not for freezing her babies or even having an abortion — but for experiencing a miscarriage in her bathroom at home in October 2023. An Ohio grand jury eventually dropped the charge of felony abuse of a corpse in February 2024.
“One thing we do know unequivocally,…Alexis Aldamir is WHITE,” one person commented on X. “That is so strange. All four were term. Idk this doesn’t sound like stillborns. Frustrating that there will be no further investigation,” said another.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, stillbirths occur in about 1 in 175 births each year, and while the rate of late-term stillbirths has improved over the past three decades, the rate of early stillbirths has remained steady.
The medical examiner, however, could not determine a cause or manner of death, if the victims were born alive, or even how long their bodies had been in the freezer, according to the press statement, which noted that “there were no signs of food, or milk, or formula inside the babies’ stomachs.”
Further complicating matters, when investigators caught up to Aldamir in a residential health care facility, they reportedly found her in a confused state and uncertain about her own identity, which factored into their decision not to pursue criminal charges. Prosecutors suggested that based on her cognitive abilities, she could not stand trial. According to probate court records obtained by NBC10 Boston, a conservatorship was approved for Aldamir after it was attested that she was “unable to receive, synthesize, or understand new information.”
Records show that Alamadir bought the apartment in 1983 and had a fifth child with the same father, whom she gave up for adoption. For more than 40 years, she worked for the same Boston accounting firm, and co-workers interviewed by police said they did not know about any of her pregnancies, adding that she was a heavy-set woman who wore loose clothes and never took a vacation.
“A prosecutor’s office cannot ethically move forward with a case that, in good faith, it believes it cannot bring to trial,” Hayden said in the case report. “Here, based on the evidence obtained through the investigation, including the many unanswered questions about the cause of death of the four babies, prosecutors have made the determination that they will not be able to bring this case to trial.”
