Patience

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1:01Phoebe Judge:This episode contains descriptions of miscarriage. Please use discretion.

1:09Patients hears a knock at the door. She goes to open it, and there are a bunch of sheriff's deputies and police officers standing at the door. Several of them are wearing sort of full, like, SWAT-looking gear. They've got tactical vests on.

1:28Phoebe Judge:In May of 2018, a 26-year-old woman named Patience Russo was living in a town in rural Nevada called Winnemucca. A few months earlier, she and her two young children had moved in with a man who'd offered them a place to stay. It was a Saturday morning when a group of officers showed up at her door. Here's reporter Caroline Kitchener. Her first thought is, you know, they're here for the guy that she's living with. You know, she figures, you know, maybe he's in some kind of drug trouble. But then, one of the officers started asking Patience about something she posted on Facebook earlier that month.

2:10Phoebe Judge:And she realizes that they're here for her. About a month earlier, Patience had had a miscarriage. Afterwards, she found a miscarriage support group on Facebook that suggested that it could be helpful to name the baby she'd lost. She decided to call him Abel. She put up a small cross in the yard to remember him and posted on Facebook about him. She wrote, quote, I'm so sorry, Abel. The officers at her door were asking questions about the cross. At first, she told them the cross was for a cat she buried. One of the officers was recording everything with a body cam. Here's audio from that day. Yeah, if you knew anything about me, I've rescued cats here for a while.

3:02Okay. Quite some time. Okay.

3:05Phoebe Judge:And then an officer starts asking patients about the Facebook post. Well, let me explain something to you, okay? I see a post on Facebook that says, oh, I'm so sorry, Abel. That's not something you would put for a cat. Why would you be sorry?

3:27Why would you be sorry, Patience? I'm not allowed to have personal things in my life. Seriously, I had a miscarriage, okay? Why is having a miscarriage a problem? Why is this illegal, apparently? I've done nothing wrong. We don't know how far along you are.

3:48Phoebe Judge:The officer wearing the body cam and speaking in the footage is a sheriff's deputy named Jacqueline Mitchum. In the body cam footage, Jacqueline Mitchum and another officer continue speaking with patients, asking her questions about how far along she was, whether or not she currently has a job. What are we doing? Can we go? Can we stop this? Nope. Why? Because we have a search warrant. You need to stay right where you are, okay? So what are you searching for? We're going to search in the house, and we're going to search where the cross is. Okay. Okay? Later in the footage, Deputy Mitchum walks away from the house, towards another officer, holding a bucket and a shovel.

4:38Phoebe Judge:He's standing near a small wooden cross. Did you see them going towards the cross? I mean, what did you see? I watched him walk over there, and I watched him dig him up, and then unwrap him, and then carry him into the van. And were they telling you what law you had broken? No. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. The End

5:43pregnant.

5:43Phoebe Judge:She was worried that if the man found out, he'd kick her out, and she'd have to live in her car again. The baby wasn't his. Abortion is legal in Nevada, so Patience decided to get one. I mean, I didn't want to have another kid, because I couldn't offer the ones I had a very good life at the moment. I called the abortion clinic in Reno and tried to make an appointment. I was unable to get to Reno and let alone afford the cost of it. Patients didn't have a working car, and Reno is about a two and a half hour drive away from Winnemucca. There wasn't a closer her option. Neither Patience nor the man she lived with had much money.

6:39Phoebe Judge:At one point, Patience had to sell the tires on her car. She says she didn't have a working phone. The man she lived with eventually became her boyfriend. Patience remembers he spent a lot of time smoking meth, and he would try to get her to join him. She says she tried to resist, but sometimes she'd give in. When she couldn't get to Reno for an abortion, she says she tried to figure something else out. I read online that if you took an excessive amount of cinnamon, that it would naturally, without causing any harm, cause an abortion. There are some websites and forums talking about cinnamon and miscarriage where people suggest that cinnamon is a natural way to end a pregnancy.

7:33Phoebe Judge:But there's no scientific evidence that this is true. Patients took the cinnamon capsules for a month. Then she stopped. She says she couldn't stand the taste. And nothing happened. Around 1 a.m. on April 21st, patients woke up with an intense pain in her back. And I couldn't breathe. So I kind of, like, smacked the back of my ribcage here, because sometimes it makes it easier to breathe, because I have issues with my back and ribs. And that didn't work. So I went into the bathroom and took a shower. And that's when I noticed I was bleeding really bad. And I sat in the shower and cried for a little while.

8:34Phoebe Judge:Patience didn't want the man she was living with to come in and realize what was going on. He still didn't know she was pregnant. So I got dressed quickly and ran out to the porch trying to hide from him. And that's when I ended up having Abel. Did you know immediately that there was no life? Yeah. I tried giving him CPR. I tried everything I could think of. I couldn't get any movement out of him. And then what did you do? I ran to the garage into where all of my stuff was in boxes. and I found some blankets and a towel and a teddy stuffed monkey and I wrapped him up and I went and buried him and put a cross up.

9:59Phoebe Judge:We'll be right back.

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12:24Phoebe Judge:After she had a miscarriage in the middle of the night, Patience Russo decided not to call 911. She says she didn't feel like she needed to go to the hospital and didn't want to leave her kids. Patience says she kept what happened to herself until she found the support group on Facebook and wrote her post about Able. And that Facebook post is what ultimately makes its way through a couple of different people to the sheriff's deputy. Deputy Jacqueline Mitchum and Patience already knew each other. Winnemucca is a very small town, and they took their kids to the same babysitter. Jack Mitchum actually was friends, you know, quite good friends with the babysitter.

13:10And they would often talk about patients. You know, the babysitter spent a lot of time with patients as kids. So, you know, she would sort of confide in Jack Mitchum and talk to her about kind of what was going on with patients, sort of how often she was taking care of patients as kids. and I think there was a lot of conversation about Patience's parenting.

13:36Phoebe Judge:About a month after Patience had the miscarriage, the babysitter told Jacqueline she thought Patience had been pregnant and gotten rid of her baby. She showed Jacqueline a picture where Patience looked visibly pregnant and a picture of the wooden cross. Jacqueline told reporter Caroline Kitchener that the photos made her think about her own baby. She had a one-year-old son. She told me in that moment, looking at those photos, she felt very confident that this baby had actually been born alive and that patients had killed it. Now, I think we need to pause and say that there's no evidence that that is the case.

14:17But that is, I think it's important to say because it's what she felt and she had a, she just had a real conviction about it. You know, having no evidence, she still felt very strongly that that is what had happened. And that conviction was what drove her to really pursue the case, even when, you know, multiple people kind of told her to leave it be.

14:39Phoebe Judge:But why did she think that? Why didn't she believe that this could have just been a miscarriage, you know? I can't say exactly why she felt that. You know, when I interviewed her, she just said, you know, she kind of felt it in her bones for whatever reason. for Deputy Mitchum, who was also a mother of young children, this all just felt very personal and it felt very emotional. And she really, you know, quite early on in this case, started to see this fetus or this baby that patients had lost as her own in a way and felt a lot of ownership over the case for that reason. But there were people telling her to let it be, to not pursue this.

15:28Absolutely, yeah. Well, her first thing that she did when she got these photographs was to drive right to the sheriff's office and go to her superior and her superior superior and say, I've got these, we got to get a warrant. We got to get a warrant right now. And both of the guys above her said, no, you don't have enough for a warrant. And so she actually goes around those two guys, and she told me that she called the district attorney herself and said, you know, I really think I need to get a warrant for this. And she then went to find another detective who she thought would be more sympathetic to this case, and he was willing to sit down with her and write up a warrant.

16:13Phoebe Judge:We reached out to Jacqueline Mitchum for the story, but she declined to comment. After she and the other officers dug up the remains, they brought them to the medical examiner. The medical examiner determined that patients' pregnancy had ended in the third trimester, between about 28 and 32 weeks. Was there any evidence that the fetus had been alive at birth? No, there was not. And that was something that really kind of came up again and again. was this fetus, you know, or baby, was it born alive? And there was never any evidence that was found to show that it was. Which meant Deputy Mitchum couldn't charge patients with murder.

16:59And so, you know, Deputy Mitchum talked with the other detective, Detective Walls, about, you know, other kinds of charges that they might pursue. And it was actually Detective Walls that found this very unique and obscure 1911 law. And that law is titled Taking Drugs to Terminate Pregnancy. You know, basically saying that you can't terminate a pregnancy on your own.

17:27Phoebe Judge:Four days after the police showed up at Patience's home, they brought her in for questioning. They told me I wasn't under arrest. They just wanted to talk. So they took me through a locked door and then through a second locked door into a conference room. And Officer Mitchum, Detective Walls, I think was his name, and another officer were in the room, and they shut the door. And they made it sound like they truly cared. And I truly didn't believe I'd done anything that wrong. So I told them everything that happened.

18:21And soon as I was done talking, Mitchum told me to stand up and put my hands behind my back. And that she was arresting me.

18:32Phoebe Judge:Patience Russo was arrested and charged with manslaughter, as well as a lesser charge of concealing a birth. Although abortion is legal in Nevada, the 1911 law the detectives found prohibits what Caroline Kitchener calls self-managed abortions. the law says that if someone tries to have an abortion after 24 weeks by using quote any drug, medicine or substance or any instrument or other means and succeeds in ending the pregnancy they can be charged with manslaughter Nevada is the only state with a law like this here's Caroline and so they need to prove that she took some action that ended her pregnancy and that she did that with the intention of ending her pregnancy.

19:27So there's a lot of talk about Patience's drug use. And Patience was a drug user. She did smoke quite a bit of weed. And then there was some evidence that she had also been smoking meth. But the only thing that she did with the purpose of trying to end her pregnancy was ingesting the cinnamon. But it's unclear, you know, there's no kind of scientific link between cinnamon and having a miscarriage.

19:55Phoebe Judge:At a preliminary hearing, Deputy Jacqueline Mitchum claimed that patients told her she smoked marijuana every day in an attempt to have a miscarriage. But Caroline says there's no record of patients telling the police she used either meth or marijuana to try to end her pregnancy. If she was found guilty, patients could be sentenced to up to 10 years in prison. She says she was worried about what would happen to her children. Her public defender made a deal. If she pleaded guilty, the prosecutor would recommend a lighter sentence, probation, drug treatment, and less than a year in the county jail.

20:36Phoebe Judge:She says her public defender told her it was her best bet, so she agreed. While she waited for a sentencing hearing, she got out on bail. It seemed like everyone in town knew about what had happened. She remembers that once, at a grocery store, some teenage boys yelled at her, calling her baby killer, and chased after her. I was messaged all the time, being told to go kill myself. And it became a lot for me to handle. In a court filing, Patience's lawyer wrote, quote,

21:29Phoebe Judge:We'll be right back.

21:41There's a civil war happening in the Democratic Party, and if there's one place that that's playing out most clearly, it's in Michigan. A crucial Senate primary battle in Michigan that could determine control of Congress in November. Congresswoman Haley Stevens and Abdul El-Sayed. A progressive Democrat and a moderate Democrat. In the end, it all comes down to the dreaded E-word, electability. But in Michigan, one candidate is trying to turn the electability concept on its head. If we think that voters walk around asking, where do I sit on some theoretical left-right spectrum? Then in theory, the bulk of the voters are somewhere in the middle.

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22:47Phoebe Judge:Patience Russo's sentencing hearing was on May 7, 2019, nearly a year after her arrest. Because of the deal she had made with the prosecutor, she expected to be sentenced to probation, drug treatment, and less than a year in the county jail. But the judge sentenced her to between two and a half and eight years in prison. She was taken to the Florence McClure Women's Correctional Center in Las Vegas, about a seven-hour drive from Winnemucca. Between her arrest and her sentencing, patients had started seeing someone new, and they'd gotten married. Her kids stayed with her husband when she went to prison.