Kristel Candelario, who was sentenced to life in prison for the death of her toddler — whom she left alone for more than a week while she went on vacation — blamed her mental problems for the decision to abandon her daughter.
Candelario spoke with Noticias Telemundo on Wednesday from prison in Cleveland, Ohio, where she’s serving her sentence for the death of her 16-month-old daughter, Jailyn.
Candelario’s attorneys said they’re aiming for the court to take her mental state into account in a future appeal of her case.
When asked how it’s possible for a mother to abandon a 16-month-old baby in a house, unattended, for 10 days to go on vacation, Candelario said, “The answer is a bit difficult for the rest of the world to understand and in particular for the people who question and point out that I have committed a diabolical act, as was mentioned in court.”
“I gave my testimony. I took the blame for my actions. I was experiencing emotional stress,” she said, adding she had been experiencing relationship issues with the girl’s father.
However, Candelario insisted that “my daughters have always been everything, my whole world to me,” and assured that Jailyn “is always in my heart and is with me wherever I go.”
Asked about the reasons for her trip to Detroit and Puerto Rico that resulted in her leaving her daughter alone, Candelario said, “It was a decision that was actually made many months before,” when she was leaving a two-month hospitalization for mental health issues.
“I was in the hospital in January and February 2023 because I had emotional and mental problems. [On] one of those two occasions, I wanted to make an attempt on my own life. For that reason, I was in the hospital without being able to walk for exactly almost two weeks. And in the month of March, I mean, my [now] ex-boyfriend and I wanted to take a vacation."
During the interview, Candelario attempted to free her ex-partner of any blame, saying she had told him she was going to leave the girl with her mother for the trip.
She also denied that she had purchased the tickets to travel having made the decision to leave her daughter unattended, but rather that the event occurred as a result of her mental state.
“Actually I left for the trip as a result of an impulse that I had, that I took, grabbed my four things and ran out of the house like when someone is being chased,” she said.
“It’s not that at that moment I thought that, ‘Ah, I was going to Puerto Rico ... I was going to be super comfortable.’ No, I never thought that. I simply wanted to get away from a life of stress, depression and anxiety,” Candelario said. “I didn’t want to continue living, because I had had a lot of problems in my life.”
During the trip, Candelario said, she thought about her daughter and the fact that she was alone: “The people who accompanied me [on the trip] could see that I was very distracted, I was very angry. They told me, ‘Kristel, what’s happening? You’re not yourself.’ I never mentioned anything [about my daughter].”
Candelario said her boyfriend asked her about Jailyn one day during the trip. “When he mentioned [the girl] to me, it was like when someone reminds you of someone who’s not with you at that moment,” but she said that she simply responded that her daughter was fine.
She confessed that for a few seconds she thought about calling a family member or neighbor to check on her daughter’s well-being, but “I didn’t do it. No, I never did it. And it was my mistake.”
Candelario said her parents never knew that she had gone on a trip and had abandoned the little girl to her fate.
“They never knew that I had gone to Puerto Rico,” she said. “They thought that I was at home or that I was with Jailyn, maybe somewhere else, in another city.”
Candelario’s parents had been traveling with her other daughter, who was 7 years old at the time: “The only thing I told them [was], ‘Go at ease, I’m going to stay here with Jailyn.” She told them she wasn’t up to doing anything during the vacation time. “That was all I told them,” she said.
Upon her return, Candelario found her daughter unresponsive and called the police.
Then, she said, “that’s when my world fell apart. Not because maybe I was thinking about going to prison. That’s the least important thing, because one is an adult and one can accept one’s mistakes. [I was in] despair. I felt she could be saved, things didn’t have to happen that way because my daughter was doing well, I always took care of her.”
Candelario’s attorney, Derek Smith, told the court that no one was trying to excuse Candelario’s behavior but that she had tried to harm herself in 2023 and was placed on antidepressants, which she stopped taking without tapering down dosage as required, which can cause side effects; he said Candelario was “not thinking clearly.”
Authorities declared Jailyn dead after finding her in a playpen surrounded by feces and urine, wrapped in dirty blankets and “extremely dehydrated,” according to the sheriff’s office. The child had lost a third of her weight during her mother’s absence.
When sentencing her, Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Judge Brendan Sheehan summarized the tragedy and Candelario’s behavior as a mother with one sentence, telling her she committed the “ultimate act of betrayal” by leaving her baby terrified and alone.
An earlier version of this story was first published in Noticias Telemundo.
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