A woman identified by law enforcement as Guadalupe Zavala Lopez walks into a gas station where an infant was later found dead in the bathroom. (Houston Police Department)
A 27-year-old woman in Texas will spend several years behind bars for leaving a dead infant inside of a gas station toilet in Houston last year. Harris County District Judge Kristin M. Guiney on Monday ordered Diana Guadalupe Zavala Lopez to serve four years in a state correctional facility after she pleaded guilty to one count of tampering with evidence — human corpse as well as one count of tampering/fabricating physical evidence with the intent to impede an investigation, court records reviewed by Law&Crime show.
Guiney also credited Zavala Lopez with 489 days of time already served.
As Law&Crime previously reported, agents with U.S. Customs and Border Protection apprehended Zavala Lopez in August 2023 at a bus station in Brownsville, Texas, which is the largest city in the U.S. portion of the Lower Rio Grande Valley.
In a news release, federal authorities described Zavala Lopez as a Mexican national and “migrant who overstayed her visitor visa and was successfully taken into custody.” The release goes on to describe her as “a homicide suspect attempting to flee to Mexico,” however, homicide charges were never filed against the defendant.
Following her arrest, a spokesperson for the Houston Police Department told Law&Crime that the agency would “likely interview her again to get more details” and stressed that the only charge was the one count of evidence tampering noted on the Twitter account — but that the investigation is currently ongoing.
“We still have to speak with her,” an HPD public information officer said. “Beyond that it depends on the rest of the investigation.”
She was subsequently charged with the additional evidence tampering charge.
According to a probable cause affidavit, a customer on April 2, 2023, went to use the restroom at a Shell gas station in southwest Houston in the middle of the night. There, they found the child inside the toilet. Houston Fire Department paramedics determined the girl had been dead for over an hour by that time.
Police then posted footage to the department’s YouTube page showing a “person of interest” — later determined to be Zavala Lopez — leaving the gas station before the newborn was found dead.
In the footage, which skips around and appears to be edited, the woman can be seen getting out of her car — which is parked at one of the pumps — and then walking through the front door of the filling station. The camera zooms in on her face as she enters the store. The footage then cuts to the same woman getting back in the car and driving away into the night. Finally, the video ends with three different still images of the wanted woman, taken from when she entered.
During a press conference announcing the efforts to obtain the public’s help in the case by releasing the video, HPD Homicide Detective Calab Bowling said the woman on the video was in the gas station for roughly 15 minutes before she left.
“No one else went inside that bathroom, and [the newborn] was not there when she walked in before,” Browning said, clarifying later that witness statements also supported that understanding of events. “It appears that she gave birth in the restroom.”
Authorities have not revealed the child’s name or cause of death.
Colin Kalmbacher contributed to this report.
