Córdoba Jury Convicts Nurse Brenda Agüero of Murdering Five Newborns
The nurse was sentenced to life for killing five babies and trying to kill eight more at a Córdoba maternity hospital in 2022. The former health minister was acquitted.
Published
The case began, in the chronology laid out at trial, on March 18, 2022, with two babies at the Hospital Materno Neonatal Ramón Carrillo in Córdoba. One survived. The other, Francisco Calderón Cáceres, died 11 hours after he was born. No autopsy was done, but tests drawn while doctors tried to save him showed somewhat elevated potassium in his blood, and there was a spot of blood on his clothes. At the time, Infobae reported, those details meant little to anyone.
On Wednesday, June 18, 2025, after six months of trial, a jury of eight citizens sitting with judges Laura Huberman and José Daniel Cesano of Córdoba's Seventh Criminal Chamber found the hospital nurse Brenda Cecilia Agüero guilty of murdering five newborns and attempting to murder eight more. The verdict was by majority, not unanimous. She was sentenced to life in prison, the only penalty the Penal Code allowed for the crimes, and was taken from the courtroom in handcuffs to Bouwer prison.
Thirteen cases were examined at trial. Several of the babies had one or more needle marks in places on the body where no injections are given, and several had levels of potassium or insulin in their blood that could only be explained by an outside injection, Infobae reported; only the last two babies who died were autopsied. Prosecutor Raúl Garzón said Agüero took doses of potassium and insulin from the hospital's crash carts, which had almost no inventory control, and injected the newborns erratically, in random spots. She was assigned to care for the mothers, not the babies, and was often left alone with mother and child, or with the baby alone while the mother recovered from delivery. According to the evidence as Infobae reported it, she was the only person present at every episode. Prosecutors argued she was driven by ambition: attacking the babies let her be the first to notice their symptoms, alert her superiors and stand out enough to be moved from obstetrics to neonatology.
On June 6, 2022, four babies took a sudden turn for the worse within hours. Doctors who testified agreed that none of them had ever seen more than one sudden collapse or death of a newborn in a single day. Dozens of doctors and nurses were put on leave that day, Agüero among them. The deaths of Melody Luz Molina and Angeline Rojas were reported to the authorities separately, and their autopsies proved decisive. The chain of deaths as a whole reached the courts only a month after the last of them, when Francisco Luperi, an engineer whose wife was an on-call doctor, went to the courts with what she had told him.
Ten officials stood trial with her. Prosecutors accused them of keeping the cases from the courts and of conduct meant to cover them up. The jury acquitted former provincial health minister Diego Cardozo, for whom prosecutors had sought a three-year suspended sentence, along with Alejandro Gauto, Claudia Ringelheim, Alicia Beatriz Ariza and María Alejandra Luján. Former hospital director Liliana Asís, former neonatology chief Marta Gómez Flores, former administrative deputy director Julio Escudero Salama and neonatologist Adriana Luisa Moralez were each sentenced to five years in prison and four years' disqualification.
Before the court's secretary read the verdict after 8 p.m., Judge Patricia Soria broke down in tears as she read the words of thanks she had prepared to close the trial. The court's written reasoning was to follow after the winter judicial recess.
No court release on the verdict could be opened. This account rests on Infobae's report from the courtroom by Iago Vieyra and on Vía País's report the same evening. They differ on two small points: Infobae says the attacks ran until June 7, 2022, and Vía País until June 6; Infobae puts the jury's deliberation at more than 10 hours, Vía País at nine.
Sources
- Condenaron a prisión perpetua a la enfermera Brenda Agüero por los crímenes de los bebés en el Hospital Neonatal de Córdoba, Infobae (Iago Vieyra, special correspondent in Córdoba)
- Condenaron a perpetua a Brenda Agüero por la muerte de bebés en el Neonatal, Vía País (Redacción Vía Córdoba)