A mother accused of murdering her 2 �-year-old daughter suggested that she confessed to the little girl's father over a hospital phone the night the toddler was rushed to the emergency ward.
If police had been listening in, it would have triggered her arrest, Erika Mendieta said in an intercepted conversation.
Mendieta is on trial for second-degree murder in the beating death of her fifth child, Emmily.
Prosecutors played a recording of the phone conversation for the jury on Tuesday.
The two people speaking were Mendieta and Derrick Parra, Emmily's father. It was February 2005, about 15 months after Emmily's death.
Parra was estranged from Mendieta and the couple's five children. He was in jail on unrelated offences the night Emmily suffered her fatal injuries.
When they are discussing the phone call Mendieta made to Parra the night Emmily was in the hospital, they appear to share the concern that the police may have been listening. Parra asks how Mendieta can be sure they weren't.
Parra: What if they do have you recorded? What if they do have you recorded? What are you gonna do then?
Mendieta: They would have acted on that a long time ago, man.
Mendieta appears aware that police are investigating her and that her phones are bugged. To Parra she is recorded saying: "I'm not stupid, I know how the police works, okay. I know that. Okay?"
Emmily was raised by Parra's sister Selena from the time she was born. Five months before the child's death, Mendieta took Emmily back. A custody battle followed, but Emmily died before the feuding parties ever got before a judge.
Emmily was rushed from her North York home to Humber River Regional Hospital on Nov. 13, 2003. She died ten days later at Sick Kids. The doctor who first attended to her noted severe bruising that covered her tiny body. An autopsy found that Emmily died of severe head trauma and an associated cardiac arrest.
Mendieta told paramedics and a hospital social worker that Emmily fell down some stairs.
