Woman who gouged out own eyes after killing infant son drops bid for new trial

A mentally ill woman who gouged out her eyes just months after beginning a prison sentence for the murder of her infant son has ended her push for a new trial.

A judge ruled Monday that Kimberlynn Bolanos was mentally fit to make decisions in her case, allowing her to reconsider an attempt to abandon her guilty plea and accept her 38-year prison sentence. Withdrawing her plea would have subjected her to a second trial in the 2013 murder of her 5-month-old son, Isaac.

Led into court on the arm of a sheriff’s officer, Bolanos sat beside her public defender in prison clothes and a pair of dark sunglasses, facing toward Judge Charles Burns as he leafed through a report on her latest psychiatric evaluation.

Asked if she understood her rights, and if she wanted to end her petition for a new trial, Bolanos spoke briefly. “Yes, I want to keep my guilty plea,” she said.

Bolanos, 32, faced the same options Monday as she did on the eve of her jury trial in 2016. She had a choice between mounting an insanity defense that might have kept her out of prison, or pleading guilty but mentally ill in a deal that would keep her incarcerated until her 60s.

Bolanos took the plea but landed in isolation in an observation cell, where she managed to pull out each of her eyeballs just months into her sentence. Burns had denied a petition to review her sentence that was filed a few months later, but an appeals court ruled that Burns should review the case based on her gruesome self-mutilation.

Bolanos seemed agitated at a court appearance last year, her hair long and unruly. She claimed at one point to be pregnant and asked not to be transported from prison for future hearings.

Her attorneys later asked for yet another psychological review, noting that Bolanos said she wanted to pursue her appeal but did not want to undo her plea — the only outcome that would get her out of prison. Citing her odd in-court behavior and thinking, as well as Bolanos' frequent hospitalizations while in prison, her lawyers asked for an evaluation to determine whether she was fit to assist her defense.

Bolanos’ hair was cropped into a buzz cut on Monday, with dark glasses obscuring her eyes. She spoke audibly only when addressed by the judge.

Burns had repeatedly ruled that Bolanos was mentally fit, including when ruling on whether Bolanos understood her rights when she confessed to killing Isaac and made her initial guilty plea.

The appeals court ruled that, had Burns known Bolanos was going to pull out her eyeballs, he might have taken a closer look at her mental state at the time of her plea.

“Obviously [the self-harm] is tragic on so many different levels," Burns said, adding that Bolanos’ fitness was not raised as an issue during her original plea hearing. "But this court did not have a crystal ball back in 2016 when she pleaded guilty,”

Burns on Monday asked Bolanos, her attorney and then the prosecutor whether there was any question that Bolanos was fit to withdraw her petition. Bolanos' lawyer asked that Bolanos be able to do so "without prejudice," which would allow her to refile a similar motion in the future.

Bolanos had suffered from paranoid delusions since her early teens, according to court records. She was known in her Northwest Side neighborhood for yelling at the sky, where she believed planes and satellites watched her every move.

She attempted suicide several times and used drugs. She only learned she was pregnant when was taken to an emergency room for an overdose. But when her son was born four months later, she had no drugs in her system, and family members said she was an attentive mother who seemed strongly attached to her son.

Bolanos lived with Isaac in the basement of her father’s house but moved out, fearing police had come to the home looking for her. She and her boyfriend went to the Diplomat Motel, in the 5200 block of North Lincoln, where she became convinced that agents of an evil cabal of “People at the Top” were going to storm their room and kill her and Isaac.

On May 30, 2013, Bolanos stabbed Isaac 44 times. She later told a psychiatrist that she admitted to the killing “to prove to The People at the Top I was just trying to help.

"Because if I would’ve died, my family and friends would have stopped getting tortured, and I wasn’t just a pawn but a girl trying to help the world.”