Nashville baby-kidnapping suspect led many lives

By Chris Echegaray and Kate Howard, The Tennessean

There are no family photos in Tammy Renee Silas' house, and the red photo album on the dining room table that was supposed to be filled with pictures of her new baby is empty.

A stack of mail has piled up with letters for Tammy Silas, Tammy Hernandez and Tammy Gonzalez.

She also could be Tammy Thomas or Tammy Gwyn, and her aliases have been associated with nearly 30 addresses in Alabama, Tennessee, Ohio and a half-dozen other states. While little is known about Silas' childhood or family ties, her criminal record as well as friends and neighbors describe a diligent, friendly woman who couldn't have children but carried a troubled past, with arrests for forgery and connections to an unsolved Nashville homicide case.

Silas, 39, faces life in federal prison on charges she kidnapped newborn Yahir Anthony Carrillo and took him to her home in Ardmore, Ala., to raise as her own. Police believe she stabbed the baby's mother, Maria Gurrola, nine times with a knife before taking the child, though she has not yet been charged in the attack. Gurrola is recovering and has been reunited with her baby.

When Silas got to Alabama, she renamed the baby Martin, said Silas' boyfriend, Martin Rodriguez Guerrero. Baby clothes are still piled high in their Alabama dining room, ready to be donated to family and friends. The bassinet in the master bedroom remains there, until her boyfriend finds a family member who needs it.

Friends and acquaintances say Silas told them she couldn't have children. The reason, her live-in boyfriend says, was a failed pregnancy when she was young.

"I think it was one of those things that she had hope or some illusion about having one," Guerrero said in Spanish. "I do remember when she told me about her pregnancy problem."

Bankruptcy, bad checks

Creditors in a 1990 bankruptcy case support Guerrero's story. Silas, then 20, listed most of her creditors as medical centers, including an obstetrician's office.

Trouble followed Silas after that. In 2002, she was arrested in two Ohio counties on charges of forgery and possessing criminal tools. The forgery charges led to her being sentenced to five years' probation for passing bad checks in Montgomery County, Ohio.

But when she was arrested and charged with possessing criminal tools in Greene County, Ohio, she never reported the arrest to her probation officer or showed up in court. A warrant for her arrest didn't catch up with her until she was questioned in Nashville in 2004 about a homicide.

Ramon Hernandez-Trejo, 27, had been shot in the head and dumped on a dead-end road in South Nashville. Silas told police she was his wife, although they never saw documentation to prove it. She had been using his last name.

"They both lived in Nashville, although they were separated at the time," said Metro detective Mike Roland, who questioned Silas. "They had separate addresses."

Silas was living on Cathy Jo Court in South Nashville, about three miles from the home where baby Yahir Carrillo would be stolen nearly five years later. Police never developed any solid leads in the shooting death of Hernandez-Trejo, although they considered the possibility that the motive could be drugs or related somehow to the Mexican Mafia.

"We never could substantiate anything," Roland said.

Asked if Silas had been a suspect, Roland said there was never a solid suspect in the still-open case. "When I investigate a homicide, everybody is a suspect till we figure out who did it," Roland said.

When police finished questioning Silas, she was charged with being a fugitive from justice because of the pending warrant in Ohio. The fugitive charge was dropped when she was extradited back to Ohio, and she served several months in jail before she was returned to probation, court records show.

Guerrero said he knew about Silas' past, and that made him skeptical the adoption she was trying to arrange in late September would work out.

Silas told friends and acquaintances she was heading to Texas to adopt or have the court grant custody of a relative's newborn. The relative, she told them, was a woman involved in drugs.

"I know that in the United States and in Mexico there is this same law that you can't adopt if you've been to jail," he said. "I told her she was just wasting her time and our money.''

Five days before the abduction of baby Yahir, Tammy Silas drove to Nashville from Alabama, telling Guerrero she was flying to Texas. A baggage claim sticker on her luggage at her house shows that Silas took an American Airlines flight from Texas to Nashville in the late evening on Sept. 28, the day before the baby's abduction.

Guerrero believed Silas had relatives in Texas because she grew up in Mesquite, the daughter of a Mexican-American father and an American mother. She has two older siblings, a brother and a sister, but the boyfriend never met her family, and Guerrero said Silas told him her parents died years ago.

'You could count on her'

Guerrero says he first met Silas when she was married to a man named Jose Gonzalez. The couple ran A-1 Framing & Remodeling & Roofing in Ardmore.

They subcontracted with several local businesses and lived with their work crew. They rented a home in Madison County, Ala., and split the cost with the six people in the work crew, including Guerrero. "She was strict if nothing else," Guerrero said.

Guerrero said he got personally involved with Silas after Gonzalez left for Mexico more than two years ago.

Local merchants, customers and contractors who complimented Silas' work ethic and drive don't believe Silas was capable of hurting Maria Gurrola.

"We were as surprised as anyone, but we think there's more to that story,'' said Ray Lewis, of Alabama. He became friends with Silas and Guerrero after they framed two houses for him.

"She would not charge me for everything," he said. "You could always count on her to be here with her crew."

Neighbor Jean Colston also finds it hard to believe Silas is charged with kidnapping a baby. "She is the nicest person,'' Colston said. "She said she couldn't have children but didn't say anything about wanting a child so badly."

Market owner Larry Satterfield remembers seeing Silas and Guerrero with a baby just days after Nashville police launched a search for baby Yahir on Sept. 29.

The couple would drop in to their neighborhood market twice a day in Ardmore - in the morning to get a breakfast biscuit and in the evening for sandwiches. Guerrero went inside the store as Silas waited in the truck with Yahir in a carrier. Guerrero looked a bit sleep deprived, Satterfield said, but seemed happy.

"There are people who need to have a baby, people who deserve to have one and people who don't," said Charlotte Satterfield, the store owner's wife. "She needed one. She would take care of a baby very well. It's sad."