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Rebecca Owen says she didn't speak a word to her daughter for almost two months.
"She basically disowned me. She surrendered all parental duties to my dad," Aubrey tells the Pitch.
Rebecca says she wanted to teach Aubrey a lesson, that she had to make logical decisions on her own. Wiglesworth says that's when Aubrey changed. "She kind of stuck to one group of people that were kind of the bad girls, and she started getting into trouble with them."
Wiglesworth remembers that Aubrey was having trouble with a particular girl and bumped into her accidentally one day. "It turned into this big brawl," Wiglesworth says. "Hair was pulled, and people were kicked and hit and slapped. It was the crowd she was hanging out with."
Wiglesworth saw less of Aubrey because she didn't want to be around the other girls. "They all kind of dabbled in drugs, lots of drinking."
Rebecca Owen has trouble forgiving herself. She failed to see how her popular and pretty daughter was deteriorating through years of what she now says was untreated depression. "That's what was the most upsetting for me as a mom, to realize what level of pain and grief she carried inside of her, alone," Rebecca says.
When Aubrey was 16, she broke up with her boyfriend. A week later, she found out she was pregnant.
"I saw him and hung out with him when I was pregnant," Aubrey tells the Pitch. "But he went and got another girlfriend to make it clear he didn't want to have anything to do with the situation of me being pregnant."
Aubrey told Wiglesworth and a couple of other close friends about the pregnancy, but she didn't tell her parents. Then she had her period and figured that she'd miscarried. The gossip died down.
When she should have been at midterm, Aubrey went to the hospital for surgery on her eardrum. During the pre-operation procedure, doctors conducted a routine pregnancy test that came back negative, Rebecca says. Aubrey was further convinced that she'd miscarried.
But a few months later, on May 15, 2000 — her 17th birthday — Aubrey fell to the floor of her bedroom in a grand mal seizure.
Rebecca found her and called 911. A registered nurse at Kansas City Hospice, Rebecca knelt down to help her daughter until an ambulance arrived. "The paramedics got to working on her, and the minute they disrobed her, you could see that belly," Rebecca recalls. "I was like, 'Oh, my God.' Then they told us in the ER that she was pregnant."
Doctors told the Owens that their daughter had gone into a seizure because she hadn't received proper prenatal care. Aubrey delivered a baby, though the frontal lobe in the baby's brain had not developed. Doctors didn't believe the infant would live long, but she survived.
Aubrey named her Samantha and, at the urging of her parents and the doctors, gave her up for adoption.
After she came home from the hospital, Aubrey was never the same.
"In hindsight, she needed to be in counseling," Wiglesworth says. "She didn't understand her own actions, why she was coping the way she was coping. She didn't understand why she would get mad for some reason, mood swings.... There were a series of bad choices and bad things that happened that led to this awful thing."
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