'Vodka mom' who suffocated newborn son commits suicide

Cottage Grove - A Minnesota woman who accidentally suffocated her newborn son after drinking an entire fifth of vodka has committed suicide following merciless ridicule on national television.

The Pioneer Press reports that 29-year-old Toni Medrano of Cottage Grove died on Saturday in a St. Paul hospital after setting herself on fire with a flammable liquid. Medrano's death comes one month after she was lambasted on HLN's "Nancy Grace" show for accidentally suffocating her three-week-old son Adrian to death last November. She'd drank a fifth of vodka before passing out on a couch where the baby was sleeping and rolling over on him. Grace, who dubbed Medrano the "vodka mom," skewered her on national television. "Did mommy booze it up and kill her baby?" Grace asked, almost shouting. "The mother spent the weekend drinking. She's waking up and she's so drunk off a fifth of vodka that she doesn't even know her baby is lying there dead beside her." "This woman laid on top of this baby for hours. It had been dead for hours." Grace also pointed out that Medrano had a history of drinking problems, with two DUIs in one month. Medrano also faced widespread condemnation on blogs and social media sites. Yvonne Hill, Medrano's mother, told Fox 9 that her daughter was "trying to... get by and live with what happened" to her son. "When she saw [Grace's show], it broke her spirit in the worst way," she added. "She didn't know my daughter," Hill said of Grace. "She only knows what she heard. She didn't know the true Toni." This isn't the first time that a mother has killed herself after being attacked on the Nancy Grace show. According to the Associated Press, Grace's harsh questioning of 21-year-old Florida woman Melinda Duckett over the 2006 disappearance of her 2-year-old son Trenton drove the distraught mother to shoot herself in the head.