Alivia Thrift expressed concern about the condition of her 1-year-old daughter Evangelina in a series of phone conversations, eventually crying, sounding panicked and saying that “something is really wrong,” her sister testified recently.
Robin Rose Yager tried to convince Thrift to seek treatment for her one-year-old daughter Evangelina, but Thrift resisted, she said.
Finally, she drove to Thrift’s apartment in Henderson in the early hours of March 24. There, she discovered that Eva — whom she had not seen in-person since the baby’s birthday in January — was dead.
A police report described the child’s body as “extremely malnourished and emaciated.” Her ribs were pronounced, her abdomen was sunken below her rib cage, her face was thin, her skin tone was ashen and her body bore marks that appeared to be abrasions or burns, according to the report. A coroner investigator said sores on her arms could have come from cockroaches or bed bugs.
Thrift, 26, was indicted in July on a count of murder and a count of child abuse, neglect or endangerment resulting in substantial bodily harm. Prosecutors have said they believe they can show that she intentionally starved her child to death.
Clark County Medical Examiner Nathan Shaller testified to grand jurors that Eva weighed about nine pounds at her death, which is typically what a child would weigh between birth and three months.
Eva’s death and the resulting criminal allegations have been met with bewilderment by Yager and Brendan Pearce, Eva’s father.
“I didn’t know until she was already dying or deceased and the moment I knew, I called 911,” said Yager in a recent interview.
“If I had known, I would have risked anything to save her,” she added.
“I feel like she tricked all of us up until the very end where she finally couldn’t hide anything anymore,” said Pearce, who also saw Eva for the last time months before her death.
Eva’s short life
Evangelina Joy Thrift’s short life began in a bathtub, according to Yager.
A birth certificate application indicated that Eva weighed just five pounds and eight ounces at birth, and was born at an apartment in Salt Lake County, Utah.
Yager said it wasn’t clear why her sister wanted a natural birth.
“She just didn’t feel comfortable being at the hospital and I couldn’t get a real straight answer out of her about it,” she recalled.
Thrift refused to allow her to be present, she testified at a grand jury hearing.
Pearce was also not there when Eva was born, but he said Thrift sent him photos and made video calls to him immediately afterwards. Once she had healed, he said, she drove to Arizona, where he lived, so that he could meet his daughter in person.
The two had been friends since they were children in Tempe, Arizona, but did not start officially dating until after Eva was born, he said.
He described Thrift as an “overachiever, try hard type of person” who set up her own doctor’s appointments and filled out official paperwork herself as a teenager.
She had hoped to become a journalist, he said. She attended Arizona State University between the fall of 2018 and the fall of 2019, but did not graduate.
According to Pearce, it was Thrift who initially raised the idea of having a child.
“Alivia was like the one person that everybody in both my family and her family figured would be the best at being a mother,” he said in a phone interview. “The fact that this has even happened has shocked both sides of the family because nobody saw this out of her.”
After finding out that she was pregnant, he said Thrift moved to the Salt Lake City area. She had become a fervent Latter-day Saint around 2022 or 2023 and wanted to be in a place where her faith was more prominent, he said.
Yager remembered things differently. She said Thrift may have been baptized in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but was not active and attended Christian churches.
Pearce recalled that she was also very firm that their child would take her last name and not his.
That was because she worried that the mother of a previous child he had could try to take Evangelina if the baby shared his last name, he said, describing her as “paranoid.”
But “she seemed like a loving mom,” said Yager.
And Eva seemed to adore her mother, lighting up with a big smile in her mother’s presence.
The first and only words Yager heard Eva say were “ma, ma, ma,” she recalled.
Apparent isolation
In the fall of 2025, Pearce went to Salt Lake City to help Thrift pack and move to Henderson, where she would be closer to her sister Yager, who lives in Pahrump.
Pearce came too because he wanted to be around his daughter and help Thrift, he said.
Eva seemed healthy and while she could be sensitive to formula, he said he and Thrift were able to figure that out and tried to transition her to soft foods.
Their baby liked to eat and “had no problems definitely making us aware when she was hungry,” he said.
After they moved to Henderson, Pearce said his relationship with Thrift became strained.
He was trying to find a job while they were unpacking and caring for Eva, he said.
One day, Pearce said Thrift lashed out and grabbed his phone from him. He grabbed it back and she hit him in the back of the head with her fist, he said.
He stuffed his things into a backpack and walked out.
After spending about a week homeless on the streets of Las Vegas, a friend bought him a bus ticket and he returned to Arizona in late October, he said.
The last time Pearce said he saw Eva in-person was just before he got on the bus back to Tucson. He said he was left with the memory of her “bubbly, little, happy face looking up at me.”
He maintained contact with Thrift because of his daughter, he said, mainly through text messages but also via the occasional phone call. She’d give him updates on Eva and ask him if he’d found a job because she wanted him to pay child support.
“She never showed a single sign that anything was wrong,” he said. “She never acted like she didn’t want the child. She never asked for any extra help from anybody else aside from yelling at me about child support. She just completely made it seem like Eva was A-OK and like she was taking care of her like any normal mother.”
The last message he received from Thrift came about a week and half before the coroner’s office called to tell him of Evangelina’s death, he said.
The text said “basically, hey is your phone still active?” he recalled. By that point, he said he was “kind of just ignoring her messages,” sick of hearing about child support.
At Eva’s first birthday in January, Yager testified that the baby seemed well.
“She still looked good,” she said. “She looked plump, she looked healthy, she was happy, she had good light in her eyes.”
But she also told grand jurors that Eva was in wet clothing because she repeatedly spit up her formula.
Yager tried to suggest that Eva might have a milk allergy, she said, but Thrift refused to change the milk.
After Eva’s birthday, she said in an interview that Thrift stopped bringing her baby to family gatherings, telling her relatives the child was with a babysitter. But Yager saw her niece in photos, including one in February.
She testified that she asked Thrift why Eva appeared to be so small in the picture. Thrift told her that Eva was teething and grumpy, Yager said.
“Hindsight lets you look back and have a more critical eye,” she said in an interview. “I noticed that her hair looked thinner, but it also looked wet.”
She also noticed that Eva’s skin color appeared to be different, but wondered if that could be because of the lighting in the photo.
Weeks later, when another sister tried to surprise Thrift with a visit in March, Thrift refused the visit and would not allow the sister to see Eva, Yager testified.
Phone calls, then a grisly discovery
Then came the phone calls.
The 6:30 p.m. conversation between Yager and Thrift on March 23 was normal, Yager testified. After Thrift mentioned that something seemed “off” with Eva, she said if the situation became bad she would go to the hospital, said Yager.
They talked again at 8:30 p.m., she said.
The conversation started off casually, she testified, “and then as the conversation progressed she let me know that she was a bit more worried about Eva, maybe there was something really wrong with her, she didn’t really know.”
Yager said she encouraged Thrift to take Eva to see a doctor and she refused, saying it wasn’t quite an emergency.
Then came a call at 11 p.m., she testified, in which Thrift sounded “completely panicked.” That led Yager and her son to start driving to meet Thrift.
“She was venting about being worried and didn’t want to take her in because she doesn’t know if it’s safe.” Yager said in an interview. “And I’m like, ‘That’s ridiculous, take her in if you’re doubting it at all. Take her in.’ And she’s like, ‘Yeah, but what if CPS gets involved?’”
She recalled Thrift fretting about Eva being small. Yager reminded her that wasn’t new.
A child welfare disclosure about Eva’s death said Clark County Family Services had no prior child protective services history with her.
While Yager and her son were on their way, Thrift instructed them to turn around, insisting that she was overreacting, Yager testified, and when Yager couldn’t convince her otherwise, they reluctantly obeyed her wishes.
Thrift had claimed to be at a babysitter’s house, Yager told the grand jury, and Yager had no idea where that was. She felt confused and helpless, but she trusted her sister to take care of Eva, she said in an interview.
In a call hours later, Yager told the grand jury that Thrift “kind of wailed out” and indicated both that she was not sure Eva was breathing and that Eva was still alive and moving.
Yager woke up her son and they headed toward Las Vegas, she testified.
As they were driving from Pahrump, Yager told grand jurors that she remained on the phone with her sister.
“She’s still refusing to call 911,” she testified. “She’s still refusing to take her to the doctor.”
She thought about hanging up and calling 911 herself, she said in an interview, but was worried to end the call, not knowing whether her sister might be suicidal.
At Thrift’s apartment complex, she said testified that Thrift insisted on coming out to them with Eva instead of allowing them into the apartment.
Eva was “was completely pale colored, maybe even a light blue hue to her, just very grayish color and her lips were the deepest purple that I’ve seen and so I knew immediately she was deceased,” Yager told grand jurors.
Yager called 911 at about 3:30 a.m., according to a Henderson Police Department report, and officers responded two minutes later.
Police described the condition of Thrift’s apartment as “deplorable.”
Henderson Police Department Det. Nickolas Papacs testified that it was filled with trash, including empty Sprite bottles and bags of half-eaten food.
At the scene, he said he and other investigators wore Tyvek suits, booties and gloves.
‘Torture she must have endured’
Days after the discovery that Eva had died, Clark County prosecutors charged Thrift with child abuse, neglect or endangerment resulting in substantial bodily harm.
But then prosecutors received autopsy findings.
Shaller observed that she had suffered an “extreme reduction in body fat and muscle” and that parts of her body were covered in abrasions, which he suggested could be related to lying in feces, vomit, urine or decaying milk.
He also found that her heart muscle was starting to die and that she “didn’t even have enough calories to make the fat in the bone marrow to replace the marrow elements,” he said.
He determined that she died from starvation and that the manner of death was a homicide.
The grand jury that heard Shaller’s testimony and Yager’s added the murder charge.
Dr. Susan Hatters Friedman is a Case Western Reserve University professor of forensic psychiatry who has extensively studied filicide, the murder of children by their parents.
She said these killings most commonly fall into the category of fatal abuse or neglect, which would often include a starvation case. Some parents in these cases will say their child’s death was an accident and that they didn’t mean for the child to die, even though the death is not really an accident in the conventional sense and often follows chronic abuse or neglect, she said.
Such parents may feel overwhelmed by the child’s needs and lack parenting knowledge or understanding of child development, she said.
Mothers who kill their children are often isolated primary caregivers and victims of past violence themselves, said Friedman. They may also have parenting stress and substance abuse issues. Sometimes, the parent has mental illness, a personality disorder or an intellectual disability.
Since the discovery of her child’s death and her arrest, Thrift has said little publicly.
She is currently in jail and declined requests for a jailhouse interview, according to the Metropolitan Police Department, which runs the Clark County Detention Center.
She also refused to talk to police without a lawyer, but told a coroner investigator that her daughter had no birth certificate or Social Security number and that she did not work, relying on a trust fund to pay her bills, according to the Henderson police report.
Asked in court if she understood the charges against her, Thrift told a judge: “I understand the meaning of them, but not why they’re applied here.”
Jeffrey Maningo, Thrift’s public defender, declined to comment for this story, saying he was new to the case and had limited information.
Yager is left with questions about what happened and why Thrift didn’t call her for help sooner, questions she knows may never be answered.
She said she didn’t think Thrift would intentionally kill Eva, but also hopes her sister accepts accountability.
“I wish I could go back in time and save both of them and get her whatever help she needs, but none of that’s possible,” she said. “I can’t help save Eva from the torture she must have endured and the suffering she went through and nothing at this point is going to be able to help Alivia face what she needs to face.”
Contact Noble Brigham at nbrigham@reviewjournal.com.
