A Miami mother was arrested after she allegedly tried to hire a hitman to kill her 3-year-old son.
According to court documents, 18-year-old Jazmin Paez went on the rentahitman.com website and requested a hitman to take her own son’s life before the end of the week. The website owner, Robert Innes, alerted Miami-Dade Police three times before an investigator was put on the case. She was charged with first-degree solicitation of murder and third-degree unlawful use of a communications device.
Innes told NBC6 Miami that he created the website to catch people attempting to hire killers. He said that the website was once for a cybersecurity company, but he’s received random requests for services such as the one Paez attempted to receive.
Despite receiving many fake requests, the website owner believed that Paez’s request was real because she sent pictures of the child, stated the exact location of where he was going to be, and asked for the job to be completed by Thursday, July 20.
“The ability to research names and addresses and verify the intended target lived in a particular address,” said Innes to NBC6 Miami. “That to me is a red flag. If that information is corroborated, to me that is something that needs to be looked at and that’s why I referred it.”
Innes tried to reach out three times to Miami-Dade Police Department’s non-emergency contact number on Tuesday before his request was finally taken seriously. He provided all of the information he had to authorities, and they then traced the IP of the computer that was used to make the request. Investigators discovered it was the same one listed by the woman who submitted the request.
According to investigators, they went to speak with the boy’s grandmother, and she confirmed his identity.
An investigator then posed as a hitman and agreed to do the job for $3,000 after speaking with Paez. Police then went to her home to arrest her on the same day.
Innes said he’d called the Miami-Dade Police Department multiple times to try to report the information, but that they referred him to Crime Stoppers, which threatened to issue a cease-and-desist letter to him if he continued to contact the organization, according to Newsweek.
Paez’s father said that his daughter is not the monster everyone is making her out to be.
“My daughter is not a monster,” the father said in Spanish to NBC6 Miami. “My daughter is a little girl who was born with health problems. She has liquid retained in her neck. She’s had 12 surgeries, she lost the ability to move her face. She’s been bullied in school, they called her ‘the monster.’ “
The 18-year-old was taken to a Miami-Dade jail and released on $15,000 bond. She was also ordered to stay away from the child. Records show that the Florida Department of Children and Families was notified as well. The child is now safe and staying with relatives.
