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

A mentally ill woman who plucked out her eyes just months into a prison sentence for the murder of her infant son has ended her efforts to get a new trial.

A judge ruled Monday that Kimberlynn Bolanos was mentally competent to make decisions in her case and allowed her to reconsider trying to abandon her guilty plea and accept her 38-year sentence. Had she withdrawn her plea, she would have faced a second trial for the 2013 murder of her five-month-old son, Isaac.

Led into court on the arm of a sheriff's officer, Bolanos, wearing prison fatigues and dark sunglasses, sat next to her public defender and watched Judge Charles Burns as he leafed through a report on her most recent psychiatric evaluation.

When asked if she was aware of her rights and whether she wanted to end her request for a new trial, Bolanos responded 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 the choice of either mounting an insanity defense that might have saved her from prison or pleading guilty but mentally ill being a prisoner would lock her up until she was 60 years old.

Bolanos accepted the request, but ended up in isolation in an observation cell, where she managed to pull out all of her eyeballs just months after her conviction. Burns had rejected a request to review her sentence filed several months later, but an appeals court ruled that Burns should review the case based on her gruesome self-mutilation.

Bolanos appeared agitated during a court appearance last year, her hair long and unruly. She once claimed to be pregnant and asked not to be transported from prison for future hearings.

Her lawyers later called for another psychological evaluation, noting that Bolanos said she wanted to continue her appeal but not go back on her plea – the only outcome that would get her out of prison. Citing her strange behavior and thinking in court, as well as Bolanos' frequent hospitalizations in prison, her lawyers requested an evaluation to determine whether she was suitable to assist in their defense.

Bolanos' hair was cut short on Monday and her eyes were covered by dark glasses. She only spoke audibly when spoken to by the judge.

Burns had repeatedly ruled that Bolanos was mentally fit, including in deciding whether Bolanos understood her rights when she confessed to killing Isaac and made her first admission of guilt.

The appeals court ruled that if Burns had 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 brought up as an issue at her original hearing. “But this court didn’t have a crystal ball in 2016 when she pleaded guilty.”

Burns on Monday asked Bolanos, her attorney and then the district attorney if there was any doubt that Bolanos would be able to withdraw her petition. Bolanos' attorney requested that Bolanos be allowed to do so “without prejudice,” which would allow her to refile a similar motion in the future.

According to court documents, Bolanos suffered from paranoid delusions since her early teens. She was known in her Northwest Side neighborhood for screaming into the sky, where she believed planes and satellites were watching her every move.

She attempted suicide several times and took drugs. She only found out she was pregnant when she was taken to the 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 because she feared the police had come home looking for her. She and her boyfriend went to a cheap hotel in Lincoln Square, where she became convinced that agents of an evil plot from People at the Top were going to storm her 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 murder “to prove to the people at the top that I just wanted to help.”

“Because if I had died, my family and friends would have stopped being tortured, and I wasn't just a pawn, but a girl trying to help the world.”