Between March 18 and June 6, 2022, thirteen babies born healthy at the Hospital Materno Neonatal Ramón Carrillo, Córdoba's public maternity hospital, collapsed suddenly in the hours after uncomplicated deliveries. Five died. Eight survived, several after emergency treatment. Prosecutors later established that one member of staff was on duty at every one of the thirteen events and had been alone with the mother and child, or with the child, during the mother's recovery. She was a twenty-six-year-old nurse named Brenda Cecilia Agüero.
Agüero was born in Buenos Aires on June 2, 1995 and grew up in Córdoba, living with her mother, Cristina Nobile, in Río Ceballos, twenty kilometers north of the provincial capital. She trained as a nurse at the Instituto San Nicolás, run by the public employees' union, and did well. In 2018 she joined the Sanatorio Allende, a private clinic, and in December 2020 she moved to the job she told the court she had wanted above all others, at the Ramón Carrillo. She was assigned to obstetrics, the care of mothers. Contact with the babies was not part of her role, and her employment record was clean.
The hospital did not report the deaths for about a month, and only two of the five babies were autopsied. That delay became a second prosecution: the hospital’s director, Liliana Asís, was convicted of concealment and sentenced to five years, and the provincial health minister Diego Cardozo resigned and was tried alongside her, though he was acquitted. The court formally recognized all thirteen babies as victims of institutional violence.
The prosecution’s case, led by fiscal Sergio Ruiz Moreno, was that Agüero injected the babies with potassium, insulin, or both. Potassium in that quantity stops the heart and leaves necrosis at the injection site; insulin drives blood sugar to fatal lows. Prosecutors argued that her motive was professional: that she attacked the babies so she could be the first to notice the symptoms, raise the alarm, and be seen as the nurse who caught it, in the hope of being moved from obstetrics to neonatology. They said she had the knowledge and the access, and that no other explanation fit thirteen collapses in eleven weeks with one person common to all of them.
She was arrested at her mother’s house in Río Ceballos on August 19, 2022 (some accounts give August 20, the day police announced it), initially over two of the deaths that fiscal Raúl Garzón described as intentional in character, and was held from that day at the Bouwer women’s prison outside Córdoba, isolated from other prisoners for her safety. She gave her first statement to investigators in September 2022. The charges grew to five counts of homicidio calificado por procedimiento insidioso, aggravated homicide by insidious means, and eight of the same offense in the attempted degree.
The trial opened on January 6, 2025 before the Seventh Criminal and Correctional Chamber of Córdoba, sitting with a popular jury under the province’s jury law: two professional judges and eight citizens, with a third judge presiding. Ten other defendants, hospital managers and provincial officials, were tried with her. It ran for fifty-seven hearing days over 163 days, the longest jury trial in the province’s history and, the press noted, without precedent in Argentina. In her final statement, on June 11, she said: I never did anything to those children. I am innocent of what I am accused of. There is no serial killer here. I love children.
On June 18, 2025, after ten hours of deliberation, the jury convicted her on all thirteen counts and she was sentenced to life imprisonment, the only sentence the Penal Code allows for the offense. The mothers in the courtroom wept. The prison service removed her immediately for her safety.
The verdict was six votes to four. The written grounds, published on July 23, set out both positions. The majority, the judges José Daniel Cesano and Laura Huberman with four jurors, relied on what they called a plurality of unequivocal indications: that she alone was present at every one of the thirteen events, that she had the skill and the means, and that no medical explanation accounted for the pattern. The minority, written by the presiding judge Patricia Soria with the other four jurors, held that in some of the thirteen cases it had not been proved that anyone had caused the collapse deliberately, and that in the cases where a deliberate act was evident, it had not been proved that Agüero was the one who committed it. Their reasoning was medical: potassium injection leaves visible necrosis, and in their view that mark could be seen clearly in only one of the thirteen babies. The month’s delay in reporting, and the fact that only two autopsies were done, had destroyed much of the evidence either side might have used.
Her lawyers, Juan Manuel Rivero and Gustavo Nievas, argued that the conviction rested on circumstantial evidence, that nobody had ever seen her give any baby an injection, and that in at least eight of the thirteen cases there was no medical clarity about what had happened. They called the toxicology partial and disputable and the psychological assessment methodologically inconsistent. In August 2025 the Chamber rejected a motion to annul the trial over a juror who had omitted information. In September 2025 the same three judges, Cesano, Soria and Huberman, admitted the casación appeals of Agüero and of the convicted hospital officials, sending the case to the Superior Tribunal of Justice of Córdoba. Daniela Morales Leanza, a lawyer for the families, answered that Agüero's responsibility had been fully proved, pointing among other things to her attempt to move to another province once she was under suspicion. No ruling from the Superior Tribunal had been reported by September 2026. Agüero remains at Bouwer, and has never admitted anything.