On May 26, 2018, Humboldt County sheriff’s deputies armed with a search warrant showed up at the residence of 26-year-old Patience Frazier where she lived with her two children in Winnemucca, Nevada.
They asked her about “Abel” based on a Facebook post Frazier authored a month earlier apologizing to Abel, saying she was “scarred n afraid” and “didn’t know what to do.” The post showed a red cross with the words: “Abel” and “I’m sorry.”
Questioned by Deputy Jacqueline Mitcham about why she was sorry, Frazier blurted out that she had had a miscarriage. As later detailed in an article in the Washington Post newspaper, Frazier asked, “Why is having a miscarriage a problem? Why is this illegal, apparently?”
“Because…we don’t know how far along you were,” Mitcham said.
Minutes later, deputies began digging in front of a small red cross in back of the home. They unearthed a body wrapped in a dog sweater and black cloth.
Dr. Laura Knight, the Washoe County Medical Examiner, performed an autopsy. She would later testify at a preliminary hearing that the cause of death was undetermined and that it was impossible to determine an exact cause. She said it was equally impossible to say there were any signs of life immediately following the birth. She said the baby was “the product of a third trimester pregnancy and estimated the gestational age at 28 to 32 weeks. There was evidence of methamphetamine and marijuana in the baby’s body.
Evidence would later show that Mitcham’s first request for a search warrant to her supervisors had been rejected. Mitcham then contacted a prosecutor, who encouraged her to seek a warrant. She consulted with a fellow detective, Dave Walls, who helped write an application for a warrant.
The warrant was based on a 1911 Nevada law which made taking drugs to end a pregnancy a crime. According to the statute, if a woman “uses any drug, medicine or substance, or any instrument or other means” to induce an abortion after 24 weeks and ends the pregnancy as a result, she could be charged with manslaughter.
It cited “suspicious circumstances related to a possible unreported birth, death, and clandestine burial of an infant.” The warrant was accompanied by a Facebook post which said, “I’ve been holding it in n hiding it but I can’t anymore. I’m so sorry, Abel. I’m sorry I’m a horrible person.
The warrant had been approved by a justice of the peace.
On May 27, Frazier’s mother, Jaci Armstrong, showed investigators text messages from Frazier describing how she had tried to end the pregnancy by taking pills and lifting 100 pound bags, and that she had “tried to miscarry the whole time I knew I was pregnant.”
On May 29, Frazier was questioned at the police station by Mitcham. During questioning, she admitted taking large doses of cinnamon after reading online that it could cause a miscarriage. She was arrested after the interview and charged with taking drugs to induce an abortion of a child after 24 weeks of pregnancy. She was also charged with concealing a birth.
At a preliminary hearing in July 2018, Mitchem testified that Frazier had told her that she had been smoking marijuana every day to try to cause a miscarriage. Body camera footage from the officers at the scene showed that testimony was false.
On March 25, 2019, Frazier pled guilty to manslaughter by inducing an abortion by taking drugs. The concealing a birth charge would be dismissed. Her defense attorney, Humboldt County Public Defender Matt Stermitz told her that the prosecution had agreed to a sentence of probation, drug treatment, and no more than a year in jail.
In a motion for a change of venue, which was never heard, Stermitz declared, “Winds of prejudice have arisen. A lynching-like atmosphere hangs heavy over the City of Winnemuca.”
On May 7, 2019, Frazier appeared in Humboldt County District Court for sentencing. The prosecution, as promised, recommended probation, drug treatment, and no more than a year in jail. The prosecutor, Kevin Pasquale, said, “If she can do these things, she will serve herself, she will serve the community, she will pay retribution for her criminal act and she’s not going to just come back here the same mess that she is now.”
Before the judge imposed the sentence, the presentence investigator, Debbie Okuma, asked to speak. She noted that Stermitz had been referring to the baby as a fetus. She said the baby was characterized in the autopsy report as an “infant” between 28 and 32 weeks old.
The judge sentenced Frazier to two and a half years to eight years in prison.
In the fall of 2020, attorney Laura FitzSimmons, who was retired, agreed to take on Frazier’s case. FitzSimmons had been in the forefront of pro-choice issues in Nevada for decades.
Eventually, FitzSimmons filed a petition for a new trial, and a hearing was held during which experts testified.
On June 28, 2021, District Judge Charles McGee issued a 40-page ruling vacating Frazier’s conviction.
The judge began his ruling with a piercing description of Frazier’s life, beginning with an account of how Frazier had suffered repeated physical abuse at the hands of her father. By age four, Frazier had suffered a broken collar bone, three fractures in one arm, scarring on her face from when her father kicked her there, and a head injury. Her parents separated when she was five years old.
In 2008, at age 16, she had her first child. The father promptly disappeared, and the child was being raised by Frazier’s sister.
The judge noted that in 2013, when Frazier was 21, she was “held hostage for four months during which she was raped and impregnated by Timothy James Warren, age thirty-six,” the judge wrote. Frazier gave birth on September 22, 2014, to a son. “Mr. Warren was arrested and charged with similar crimes in Montana in October 2017. He was imprisoned and later released on parole to Winnemucca.”
Frazier moved to Spearfish, South Dakota and gave birth to another son in January 2017. That father had left by the time her son was born. She then returned to Humboldt County. She was sporadically employed and homeless, living in her car with the two boys. In December 2017, she moved in with J.D. Ames on the outskirts of Winnemuca, the judge noted.
The judge noted that in the cold months of the high mountain desert, Frazier “experienced profound anguish when learning she was pregnant yet again. Had she been able to legally abort the child in a clinical and sanitary operating room, her conscience would have eased.”
Her car was not running. She could not afford to fix it. She sold the tires for some cash. She was afraid that if Ames learned she was pregnant, he would kick her and the two boys out.
“Patience Frazier was unable to come out of the cold except for moments when men would give her shelter for sex, including the ostensibly charismatic ‘life save,’ but real life jerk, her meth dealer J.D. Ames (who this writer does not know personally, but thinks he is a jerk for being a predatory drug dealer),” the judge wrote.
“The prospect of adding a newborn put her on the cusp of having a nervous breakdown,” the judge said. “So she tried, in feeble and ineffectual ways, to end the pregnancy. The premature fetus was nonetheless stillborn….The only point of this extended narrative is to posit an observation: Patience Frazier has never been given the opportunity to come out of the cold that chills her soul today.”
The judge found credible testimony from the witnesses at the evidentiary hearing.
Dr. Laura Knight, who performed the autopsy, testified, as she did at the preliminary hearing, that it was impossible to confirm the exact cause of death and it was impossible to say there were any signs of life immediately following the birth. She also agreed with other medical experts that it was not possible to cite Frazier’s drug use as a causative factor, “much less cinnamon, lifting heavy objects or punching one’s stomach – whether single or in any combination” as causative factors.
Dr. Greg Davis, a pathologist, testified that while methamphetamine use has a “correlation” to poor outcomes, that correlation was far different from causation, which the crime required. The “cause and manner of death for baby boy Frazier are undetermined,” he said.
Dr. Mishka Terplan, board certified in gynecology, obstetrics, and addition medicine, testified, “In summary, my review of the records is most consistent with a spontaneous stillbirth. There is no scientific evidence to support any…association between any of her behaviors during pregnancy (including the taking of cinnamon) and this outcome. The assumption that pregnancy confers an internal gestational clock, that everyone knows or should know their gestational age is absurd and displays a basic ignorance about human reproduction.”
Dr. Laura Fulginiti, a forensic pathologist and expert in baby bone growth, testified that the gestational age of the baby was 25 to 32 weeks.
The judge noted the statute requires the fetus be more than 24 weeks old. “Even if the offense does not impliedly incorporate specific intent, it needs to be interpreted in a way that carries forward a reasonable standard on the part of the mother who is attempting to miscarry,” the judge said. The judge said that Frazier was incapable of making any guess as to the gestational age of the baby.
The judge said that Stermitz, her defense attorney, had wasted many hours trying to create a defense that the child was born alive and then died. But he abandoned that after realizing such a defense could expose Frazier to a murder charge.
The judge said he believed “that there has been a miscarriage of justice in this case.” He pointed to Stermitz, “who this Court finds DID fall far below the standard expected of competent counsel in case such as this one, failing to recognize several patently obvious defenses that Patience really had no idea of the gestational age of her unborn fetus, and even if she did, what she did to herself did not cause the baby to be stillborn.”
Judge McGee said that “Stermitz’s efforts were blatantly ineffective, and had he chosen the right strategies, there was substantial reason to conclude that the jury would have found Patience Frazier not guilty !” He declared, “Patience has been portrayed as an antichrist, but this Judge thinks she is, instead, just a mother caught hopelessly in the web of poverty with lack of any support system.”
On July 8, 2021, Frazier was released on bond pending a possible retrial.
Both the prosecution and the defense filed appeals. FitzSimmons sought to persuade the Nevada Supreme Court that the 1911 law was unconstitutional, but the court refused to do so. In August 2023, the Nevada Supreme Court upheld the new trial ruling.
Subsequently, the prosecution refused an offer to allow Frazier to plead guilty to a lesser charge.
In March 2025, FitzSimmons filed a motion to dismiss the case with prejudice, meaning it could not be refiled. The prosecution asked that the case be dismissed, but to allow for a refiling of the charge.
On April 7, 2025, Judge Michael Montero ruled on FitzSimmons’s motion. The judge noted that the case had been remanded to the trial court in January 2024.
“The State has done nothing to prosecute this case since that time – there has been no request for a status hearing or an arraignment,” the judge noted. “Nor has there been additional discovery indicating the State can prove Defendant’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.”
Judge Montero then dismissed the case with prejudice.
In February 2026, the state of Nevada awarded Frazier $100,000 in compensation.
– Maurice Possley
Posting Date: 10-14-2025
Last Update Date: 02-25-2026
