Four years ago, Rosa Jimenez, 38, sat in a Texas prison, convicted of murdering an Austin toddler back in 2003 by stuffing paper towels down his throat. The truth is, she hadn’t killed him; the boy had likely done it to himself, something numerous experts and lawyers recognized. In fact, over the next 17 years, five different judges had advocated for Jimenez’s innocence and release, but she remained behind bars. Worse, Rosa—five foot two, with long, black hair and a girlish face—was dying from stage-four kidney disease, and a pandemic was raging through Texas prisons, killing inmates like her with weakened immune systems. Even with everything stacked against her, Jimenez—a warm, humble person—remained hopeful. “I’m not going to give up,” she wrote me in September 2020. “Some days I feel discouraged, sad, angry all at the same time, but I have faith and hope that all this is going to come to pass.”
Four years later, Rosa’s faith and hope have been rewarded—and her life has changed utterly. She was released on bond in 2021 and reunited with her children, who had been taken from her when they were babies. She got married in July 2023 and settled in San Antonio. Then, a month later, on August 7, she was officially exonerated—and became a grandmother just a few minutes later. But she still needed a kidney, and soon she had the help of admirers, such as San Antonio Spurs Coach Gregg Popovich, who urged fans to help find her a living donor.
On September 26, Rosa got her new kidney. Her surgery at the Weill Cornell Medical Center, in New York City, lasted five hours. “I’m really sore,” she told me Sunday. “But my body is accepting it.” The donor was a healthy 51-year-old man from Colorado who had been touched by Rosa’s story. She didn’t know his name—and she is still trying to figure out how to adequately thank him. The other day, she started making a video to send him and found herself weeping. “I don’t have words for him,” she said later. “How can I say thank you? He risked his life to save mine.”
The first half of Rosa’s story had a lot less drama than the second. She was born in 1982 in Ecatepec, a large suburb of Mexico City, into a poor family (her mother sold tamales from a pushcart, and she never knew her father). As a teen, she crossed illegally into the U.S. and made her way to Austin. In January 2003 she was 20, pregnant, and living in a North Austin apartment with her infant daughter, Brenda. Rosa babysat for money, and on January 30, a little boy she cared for choked on a large wad of paper towels, passed out, and died. Jimenez had no criminal record, but she was arrested and put on trial for murder. Though there was no physical evidence that Jimenez had crammed the towels down the boy’s throat—she said the boy must have done it himself—the jury believed the police, the ER doctor, and the pediatrician who said that was impossible. She got 99 years in prison.
While incarcerated, Jimenez developed stage-four kidney disease. Years of working in the prison fields left her in constant pain, so she was given naproxen and ibuprofen—two drugs that can cause chronic kidney disease if taken excessively for a long period of time. She was only able to see a doctor every three months, and she was told it was practically impossible to get on the transplant-eligibility list.
But she had picked up allies, such as Mexican documentary filmmaker Lucía Gajá, who made a sympathetic film about Rosa called Mi Vida Dentro (My Life Inside). “She’s very strong,” Gajá told me. “She’s found a way to not be sad all the time. I mean, of course she’s sad, but you see her, and she lights up. She’s a beautiful spirit. She has a lot of love inside her.” After seeing the film, several lawyers reached out to Rosa, determined to help her. They found experts who said that children cram all kinds of things down their throats; this case was much more likely an accidental choking than a purposeful one. From 2010 onward, Rosa’s case went before various state and federal appellate courts. Twice she was granted a new trial, but both times the State of Texas objected, so she never received one. By early 2020, no fewer than five judges had said she was likely innocent. In January 2021 judge number six—Karen Sage of the 299th district court in Austin—declared her likely innocent and allowed her attorneys to post bond to get her out.
It was a dramatic day: Rosa was picked up from the prison, thrown into a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement van, and almost sent back to Mexico in an “expedited deportation.” (The Mexican consulate intervened, calling it a “humanitarian-type case.”) By the end of the day, she was finally free. She made up for lost time—going to her daughter’s wedding a few days later, reconnecting with her son Aiden (whom she had given birth to behind bars), and starting dialysis—while trying to find a new kidney. She began dating Mary Jane Flores from San Antonio, an outgoing, outdoorsy woman who made it her project to get her shy girlfriend out into the world. “She really understands me,” Rosa told me last summer. “She knows that I went to prison when I was really young and I didn’t know anything. I think she’s making it her job now. Like, we’re going to do something new every time.” They married in San Antonio in July.
But she still hadn’t been exonerated. That finally came to pass in August, when Travis County District Attorney José Garza filed a motion to dismiss her case on the grounds that she was “actually innocent.” Sage followed through on August 7, apologizing to Jimenez “for the grievous injury that has been done to you in the name of criminal justice.” Minutes later, Jimenez became a grandmother when Brenda gave birth to a daughter: Alexia.
With her exoneration, Rosa became eligible for compensation under Texas law—up to $80,000 for each year she spent behind bars. But what she really wanted was a new kidney. She had been evaluated at the Weill Cornell Medical Center, in Manhattan, home to one of the best transplant programs in the country, which helped her set up a web page with the National Kidney Registry. Popovich helped her cause by speaking out in her favor—and pointing Spurs fans to her web page. “She desperately needs a live donor so she can get a kidney transplant,” he said. “Help save her life.”
The live donor found Rosa, and she found her new kidney. She will stay in the Manhattan hospital for three months to make sure there are no complications, and then she and Mary Jane will return to Texas, where they are determined to live like ordinary people. A year and a half ago, Rosa told me that, after all the drama, all she wanted was a kidney and some normalcy. “That’s all I want: a normal life.” She and Mary Jane bought a home in Poteet, a small, peaceful town thirty miles south of San Antonio. In prison Rosa worked as a graphic designer for a program that puts together braille textbooks for schools, and she’s continuing that now, volunteering to do art for a braille program in San Antonio.
She and Mary Jane still act like newlyweds around each other. “When I got out,” said Rosa, “I didn’t know much about life, didn’t know what I wanted. I told Mary Jane I didn’t know how to love her, I didn’t know how to communicate. Now I’m learning. She pushes me: ‘Tell me how you’re feeling, tell me what you’re thinking—otherwise you’ll never learn how to communicate.’ ”
Mary Jane had never met anyone like Rosa. “She’s one of those people who gets knocked down, then gets up, dusts herself off, and tries again.” But it was Rosa’s eyes that made Mary Jane fall in love. “Her eyes—they dance.” Even after all she’s been through, said Mary Jane, “I see so much life in her eyes. She walks into a room, and she’s got everyone smiling and laughing.”
