Left: Jessica Vlasac after her arrest for allegedly killing her infant son. Right: Vlasac's mug shot (Polk County Sheriff's Office).
A 42-year-old Florida woman is accused of punching her 3-month-old son so hard that her diamond ring crushed his skull and killed him.
Jessica Vlasac stands accused of aggravated child abuse in the death of her son, who has not been identified.
The Polk County Sheriff's Office said in a press release that its deputies responded shortly before midnight on Sept. 6 to a Lakeland home for an unresponsive infant.
Paramedics rushed the boy to the hospital where doctors pronounced him dead shortly thereafter. Doctors noted the boy had an abrasion and bruising on his head.
Vlasac told deputies "I think I killed our son." She claimed she accidentally fell asleep with the boy, and when she woke up, she found him lying face down on the bed, "not moving and cold to the touch," cops wrote.
But an autopsy told a different story.
It revealed the baby had subdural hemorrhaging around the skull. The medical examiner found three separate impact injuries to the boy's head, including one on the forehead that appeared to be caused by a square-like object, cops said.
As detectives were interviewing Vlasac, they noticed she was wearing a large, diamond-like stone ring. It was the same shape as the square-like object noted in the autopsy, according to cops. The medical examiner later confirmed the ring is what caused the impact injuries.
When deputies were confiscating the ring, she asked if it was the object that killed her son, deputies said.
Investigators interviewed people in the house at the time the infant was found unconscious. They said Vlasac was caring for the boy by herself in the room when they heard screaming.
The boy's father told cops Vlasac "becomes violent" when she drinks, per the press release. He said that Vlasac told him that she bought some booze around noon that day.
"Later that night, she sent multiple messages stating that she had killed the infant and that he was dead," cops wrote. "She had also deleted some messages."
Vlasac also called the father a few days after their son's death and seemed "unusually normal" when talking about it, the press release stated.
Cops arrested Vlasac on Thursday. She remains at the Polk County Jail without bond. She has a pretrial detention hearing on Thursday and an arraignment on Oct. 13.