The guilty plea resolved the prosecution of Jazmin Paez, but the most lasting outcome was the permanent transfer of the boy’s care and legal status.
MIAMI, Fla. — When Jazmin Paez pleaded guilty Monday in the case accusing her of trying to hire someone to kill her 3-year-old son, the criminal file moved toward closure, but the child’s future had already been settled elsewhere.
By the time of the plea, Paez’s parental rights had been terminated and the boy had been adopted by Paez’s mother, according to sentencing coverage. That made the criminal sentence only one part of the story. The other part was the path the child took from the grandmother’s home, where police found him safe in 2023, to a permanent legal arrangement that ended any possibility of contact with Paez during her long probation term.
The first public sign of that separation came almost immediately after the arrest. According to the 2023 reporting, officers investigating an online murder-solicitation request went to the home address listed in the submission and found the child there with his grandmother. She told detectives that Paez had moved out in May and was living with her father, while the child remained in her care. A dependency hearing followed within days, and the grandmother was formally granted custody of the boy for the time being. When the judge asked how the child was doing, she answered, “He is doing great.” That short exchange became one of the few calm notes in a case defined by disturbing allegations.
The accusations themselves were extreme. Police said Paez used the parody website rentahitman.com in July 2023 to seek the killing of her son, supplying a photo, an address, her phone number and a promise to pay $3,000. Authorities said she wanted the job done by that Thursday. The site’s operator, Robert Innes, alerted law enforcement because the request appeared specific and credible. Police later said a detective posed as a hitman, contacted Paez and got her to confirm the arrangement. She was arrested on charges that later expanded into the counts resolved by Monday’s plea: solicitation of first-degree murder, unlawful use of a communications device and tampering with or fabricating physical evidence. The child, though central to every filing, never became a public figure in the way the defendant did; the court record instead shows a steady effort to move him out of danger and out of view.
At sentencing, prosecutors provided a family background that made the custody result even more consequential. Assistant State Attorney Ayana Duncan said Paez had been a teen mother and that the child may have been conceived in an incestuous relationship. She said the child’s father was absent and that the same grandparents were both his maternal and paternal grandparents. That meant the family structure around the child was unusually complicated before the criminal case even began. Duncan also said Paez struggled with parenting and may have been pushed toward the plot by the collapse of a teenage relationship after she revealed she had a child. Those remarks did not excuse the conduct, but they showed why the state treated the child’s placement as a central issue from the start.
The final criminal sentence reinforced the separation already imposed by family court. Paez, now 20, received two years of community control and 12 years of reporting probation, along with therapy, a mental health assessment and any required treatment. She avoided prison, but she did not regain any parental role. Sentencing coverage said she is barred from contact with the child and that the restriction runs through the end of her supervision, into 2040. If she violates probation, she could face up to 40 years in prison. In effect, the plea let the state step back from incarceration while keeping the child-protection wall in place.
Other family voices surfaced only in fragments. Paez’s father defended her publicly after the arrest, saying his daughter had serious medical problems, had undergone many surgeries and had endured bullying. Those comments described a young woman he believed had been misunderstood. The court record moved in a different direction. It treated the child’s safety, stable housing and legal permanence as the facts that mattered most after the initial emergency passed. Even the original evidence fit that frame: the recent photo used in the online request had come from the grandmother, who did not know it would end up in a police file. Her home then became both the place where officers found the boy safe and, later, the family base from which a permanent adoption emerged.
The criminal case is now resolved by plea, but the longest-lasting outcome is the one outside the headline: the child remained with relatives, was adopted and is not expected to return to his mother’s custody under the current order.
Author note: Last updated April 15, 2026.