Angelique Robledo can pinpoint the moment she decided to make a change.
Inside a Maricopa OB-GYN facility in summer 2010, Robledo saw the image of her unborn son appear on a black-and-white monitor during her first ultrasound procedure. The image on the screen showed a small peanut with a tiny heartbeat.
“I was like ‘Oh my god, he’s real,’” said Robledo, now 20. “There really is something inside of me.”
Robledo said the realization came with a feeling of guilt. The young, soon-to-be mother, then 17, had smoked meth the night before — one of several drugs she’d tried as a Maricopa teen prior to the pregnancy.
With the first image of her son in front of her, she made a choice.
“That was the moment that I completely never touched it again,” Robledo said.
While it was this moment that could perhaps be called life-changing (Robledo said if it weren’t for her son, she might have ended up a “tweeker,” or meth user, on the street) it’s not the moment in her difficult pregnancy that Robledo became known for.
The media storm that eventually rained down on the teenager — TV news stories, the Dr. Phil show and even a call to appear on Anderson Cooper 360 — came from a later life-threatening moment that fueled splashy headlines across the country and overseas.
From the New York Daily News (“Teen in Arizona attacked pregnant friend, tried to cut baby out of her womb, police say”) to the Daily Mail in the U.K. (“Girl, 18, tries to kill her pregnant friend and rip her unborn baby from the womb”), a single, traumatic day in Robledo’s pregnancy became known on different continents. The show “Frenemies” on the TV channel Investigative Discovery will feature the incident again in an upcoming episode.
Kassandra Toruga — who was labeled a “friend” by various media outlets, but as Robledo explained and police reports say, was more of an acquaintance — plotted to perform a Cesarean section on Robledo while visiting her Cobblestone Farms home on Feb. 16, 2011. Robledo was nine months pregnant.
Toruga, then 18, had packed a diaper bag with two butcher knives. When the girls were home alone, Toruga started a fire in a bedroom closet. She was arrested the following month after telling authorities she “was going to kill Angelique and take the baby,” a police report states. Toruga had told friends and police she was pregnant, a story later determined false.
For the second time, Robledo found herself watching a screen and realizing her situation. She said before the news reports came out, many people, including cops, friends and family members, thought she had been exaggerating her suspicions that Toruga was trying to harm her.
Not long after the arrest, she received a text informing her media had picked up the story. It was the television screen that confirmed she had not been telling tall tales.
“I’m just like sitting here bawling my eyes out because it became more real at that point,” she said. “Watching it on TV and seeing that it was real; it just became more real for me. Because I honestly felt like I was crazy. Because no one believed me.”
Toruga was sentenced in February 2012 to more than seven years in a mental health facility. She pleaded guilty by reason of insanity to attempted arson.
Today, Robledo can repeat the story of what happened to her on Feb. 16, 2011 with a matter-of-fact attitude. But her confidence, she said, didn’t come easily. Following the incident, she was depressed and felt sorry for herself. When she finally spoke to the media and shared her story, that’s when her strength came back.
“This is not publicity for me,” she said. “This is not something that I want anyone to go through. When I watch shows like ‘I survived’ … before this happened to me, I looked up to those people, like ‘Oh my gosh, you survived something so big and so traumatic you’re still able to walk around and be the person you are.’”
With all the media attention Robledo has received, the story that’s never been shared is how her son, 2-year-old Ryland, the unborn baby who was almost taken from her, transformed her life, even before Toruga entered the picture. The responsibility of motherhood fueled a 180-degree flip from a drug-taking teen not afraid to throw a punch to a caring mom working two jobs with the goal of becoming a registered nurse.
A Southern California native, Robledo moved to Maricopa her seventh-grade year. Her stepdad, the manager of a phone packaging company, was able to transfer to a new plant in Arizona. Robledo’s family — her mom and three stepbrothers — transitioned from a mobile home trailer park in Brea, Calif., to a five-bedroom house with a swimming pool.
Moving to a new town was difficult, Robledo recalled. Maricopa’s youth culture — one shaped by a lack of activities with the city’s removal from the Phoenix area — had an impact on her young, naïve self.
“I didn’t know what sex was,” she said. “I had no idea what anything was. I was completely clueless.”
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