A Southern California mother was sentenced to more than 12 years in prison after pleading guilty to her role in torturing her 7-month-old son to death and concocting a kidnapping story to cover up the sickening crime.
Rebecca Haro, 41, pleaded guilty Friday to charges of felony child abuse and involuntary manslaughter stemming from her role in the death of her child, Emmanuel, whose remains still have not been found.
Haro had faced the charges for allegedly helping her husband torture the boy and then fabricating the kidnapping tale.
She had previously pleaded not guilty to charges of murder and filing a false police report — even though her baby’s father, Jake Haro, 32, pleaded guilty to murder in October and was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison.
The horrifying case unraveled in August, when the mom claimed a Spanish-speaking man attacked her while she was changing Emmanuel’s diaper in a San Bernardino parking lot and ran off with the tot.
The parents gave tearful interviews on TV news shows begging the kidnapper to return their infant, but authorities discovered inconsistencies in their story and arrested the pair for murder.
Although baby Emmanuel’s body has never been found, his father reportedly admitted to an undercover inmate that he killed the child and dumped his body in a trash can.
Jake Haro was already on probation for charges arising from a separate, disturbing act of child abuse from 2023 that left his 10-week-old daughter from a previous marriage maimed and bedridden for life.
Jake escaped jail for that crime, despite prosecutors’ pleas for a San Bernardino judge to put him behind bars.
Even from a jail cell, Rebecca Haro stuck to the couple’s kidnapping story.
“I will not give up on my baby,” she told Southern California News Group on August 24.
But prosecutors said Haro was complicit in her son’s death.
“Rebecca Haro’s plea and sentence today reflect her sins of parental omission,” Assistant District Attorney Brandon Smith said. “Her choice not to intervene was a choice to allow, if not facilitate, Emmanuel’s death.”
The house where little Emmanuel was murdered underwent major renovations as the family of the little boy’s killer parents try to make the community move on.
