A teenage girl suffocated her just-born baby boy before putting his body in a shopping bag then going on a trip to a Victoria's Secret store the next day, prosecutors have said as she was charged with murder.
Tiona Rodriguez, now 18, has pleaded not guilty, with her lawyer saying it was a stillbirth, not a killing.
Thursday's indictment came nearly two years after Rodriguez was arrested on a $US45 ($A61.68) shoplifting charge at the lingerie store, where a security guard found the body in a bag Rodriguez was carrying.
Prosecutors said their lengthy investigation filled out a picture of a girl who became a mother at 14 and was determined not to let anyone know she was having another baby.
"She knew she would be in big trouble if her family found out, so she made a plan - to kill this baby," Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Rachel Ferrari said. "She had derailed her life once. She was not going to do it again."
To carry out a plan formulated for weeks, the then 17-year-old Rodriguez went to a friend's house Oct. 16, 2013, and delivered in a bathroom, tore the 3.6-kilogram boy's umbilical cord with her hands and asphyxiated him, Ferrari said.
In a text message, Rodriguez used a vulgarity to describe the baby and added she'd "dig a hole" and "put it somewhere" adding an "LOL" - online jargon for "laughing out loud" - the prosecutor said.
But defence lawyer Earl Ward said Rodriguez hadn't realised she was pregnant.
While prosecutors said the baby was full-term, Ward said Rodriguez didn't know how long she'd been pregnant.
Prosecutors said Rodriguez knew plenty about pregnancies and trying to conceal them.
After having her now 4-year-old son - a pregnancy unknown to her family until she went into labour - Rodriguez delivered again in 2012, Ferrari said. That child didn't survive.
Ferrari said the circumstances of the death are unclear, but that Rodriguez had texted her then-boyfriend about smashing or burning the body to disguise what it was. Ward said that baby also was stillborn.
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