Mother arrested on suspicion of drowning her child

GILROY >> A 35-year-old Gilroy woman was arrested Sunday on suspicion of drowning her young child, police said.

Officers were called to a home on the 7900 block of Westwood Drive about 11:30 a.m. by a woman who said she had drowned her 2-year-old daughter, Gilroy police Monday. They arrived to find a lifeless girl in a bathtub filled with water.

The child, identified by family members as Mackenzie Montelongo, was rushed to Saint Louise Regional Hospital in Gilroy, where she was pronounced dead.

An officer found Marcie Montelongo, Mackenzie’s mother, near the intersection of Miller Avenue and First Street. Police said Montelongo told the officer she had just killed her daughter.

Montelongo was a single mother who had moved to the neighborhood in June from her father’s old home in Hollister, according to relatives. She was arrested and booked into the Santa Clara County Main Jail in San Jose on a murder charge and remains in custody on no bail.

Word of Mackenzie’s death has left the extended Montelongo family in shock. For most of October, the mother and daughter visited relatives in the family’s hometown of La Union, New Mexico, and even talked about moving there to join them permanently.

“When I found out, I just couldn’t control myself, because I’d been with the baby just a few days ago,” Marcie Montelongo’s aunt, Dolores Montelongo, said in a phone call.

During the three-week visit, the family ate lunch together at Denny’s — where Mackenzie sat up all on her own, Dolores Montelongo said — and spent hours helping her totter around the living room.

It was the first time the relatives had seen the mother in more than a decade, the aunt said, and she seemed to be doing well. Marcie Montelongo has had a lifelong disability that makes her physically and mentally “slower” than other people, relatives said, and which had made her a target of mental abuse by other relatives while she was growing up.

She left her Gilroy home as a teenager and met Mackenzie’s father while living out of state, the aunt said. Relatives described her as a dedicated and protective mom.

“She’s never really had that love, she’s always been like a reject — not around us here (in New Mexico), but the times that we would see her, she was always real quiet,” said Becky Montelongo Evaro, Marcie’s first cousin.

As is typical in cases involving child deaths, the District Attorney’s Office and the Medical ExaminerCoroner’s Office joined Gilroy police in investigating Mackenzie’s death.

Anyone with information about the case can contact Gilroy police Detective Chris Silva at 408846-0335.