A Teenage Football Player In Indiana Has Been Sentenced To Prison For Killing A Cheerleader Pregnant With His Baby
An Indiana teenager has confessed to killing a fellow student because she was too far along in her term pregnancy to have an abortion. Aaron Trejo was 16 years old when he and 17-year-old Breana Rouhselang started up the cliche football player-cheerleader romance that unwittingly resulted in a pregnancy. Trejo, a then-member in good standing of the school’s football team, was angry that Rouhselang waited until she was six months pregnant to tell him that he was the father. According to court documents, neither one of them wanted the child, but Trejo took matters into his own hands and spent a week planning her murder.
In December 2018, Trejo confessed to the murder. On Tuesday, he was sentenced to 65 years in prison for homicide and feticide.
Aaron Trejo stabbed her, choked her with her scarf and put her body in a dumpster.
In December 2018, Trejo entered a ‘not guilty’ plea for the homicide of Rouhselang and for the feticide of their fetus. Earlier that week, police found Rouhselang’s body in a dumpster after she was reported missing. Rouhselang told her mom that she was going to meet Trejo around behind their Mishawaka home around 11 p.m. When her mom woke up a few hours later, around 1 a.m., she was concerned that Rouhselang was still not back. She went over to Trejo’s home, a few blocks away, to ask where Rouhselang was, but he told her that she never showed up to talk in the alley behind her home. He also told Rouhselang’s mother that he lost his phone and that she wouldn’t be able to reach him.
Investigators found Rouhselang’s glasses and a “stocking cap” that belonged to Rouhselang. “There was apparent blood on the hat,” a probable cause affidavit said. Investigators searched the premises and businesses nearby and found her body in a dumpster with a black plastic garbage bag placed over her head and torso.
Trejo was brought in for questioning and within a few hours confessed to the whole thing.
The investigator who interrogated Trejo said in an affidavit that “there were several pauses and quiet times” during the questioning. Soon enough, he asked Trejo if they ever fought about the pregnancy, to which “Aaron Trejo quietly said, ‘Yes.’ Aaron then explained that Breana waited too long to tell Aaron about the pregnancy to get an abortion,” according to the affidavit. When the detective asked Trejo “what he did about that,” he replied, “I took action … I took her life.”
Trejo had plotted to kill Rouhselang for a week. He brought a knife and a garbage bag from his home over to the alley behind her house where they were to meet and stabbed her in the heart. He thought that using a knife would kill her quickly. “Trejo said that he had been planning and thinking about killing Breana and the baby for about a week and had not told anybody,” the affidavit states. Trejo threw Rouhselang’s phone and knife into the river after he threw her body into a dumpster.
Autopsy reports found that she was also strangled with her own scarf.
The autopsy confirmed that she died from multiple stab wounds and that “her scarf had been tied so tightly that strangulation was occurring before Breana died.” Rouhselang’s own father and stepmother had no idea that she was pregnant. “We’re just in shock, really. We’re in disbelief that this is going on,” Breana’s stepmom, Nicole Rouhselang, told ABC. “I woke up this morning and wanted to send her a text. But, there’d be nobody on the other end.”
Trejo’s family has since been bombarded with hate messages on social media, but his aunt, Alexzaundra Patton-Manu told the New York Post that “We just want everybody to stop trying to harass everybody in our family. We didn’t do nothing wrong.” Patton-Mandu added that Trejo had suffered a “bad concussion” a few months prior and “that could have messed with his mind.”
Breana Rouhselang has been remembered as a “precious, beautiful, innocent, well-loved young woman.”
Rouhselang’s obituary cites that her baby would have been a girl, to be named Aurora MacKenzie Rouhselang. She was looking forward to receiving a letter at a sports banquet the afternoon after she was murdered, and planned to study athletic training in college. Breana Rouhselang was Mishawaka High School’s football team manager, a softball coach and a cheerleader.
