A severely obese woman who was charged with murdering her sister’s son has been set free after her defense team argued that she was too big to have committed the crime.

Mayra Rosales, 31, initially took responsibility for the death of her nephew by saying she had fell on top of him. After a review officials declared the injuries were not consistent with the cause of death and determined that only a severe blow to the head could have caused death.

Eliseo Rosales Jr. died on March 2008 when he was only 2-years-old. Rosales, who had been babysitting at the time he was taken to hospital later recanted her story and confessed that she had invented the story to protect her sister Jaime Rosales, whom she claimed had struck the boy numerous times over his body with a hairbrush.

“I was more of a mother than Jaime,” Mayra Rosales told Reveal magazine in an interview. “Whenever she wanted to go out or go shopping, she didn’t take the kids. She would always leave them at home with me.”

Mayra and her husband Bernie moved lived with her sister Jaime, who had been caring for her when Mayra became so large she could barely to walk.

Mayra Rosales was arrested in 2008 and during the trial her lawyer stated that she was not physically capable of killing the boy.

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“It would have required her to have to swing her arm to strike the child on the head but she could never move her arm in that manner,” Sergio Valdez, Mayra’s lawyer said as reported by The Brownsville Herald.

“We were all trying to cover for my sister,” she said, according to the Daily Mail. “There was abuse from her toward her son. I thought I was dying anyway so I decided to admit that I’d done it to protect my sister because I love her.”

Her sister pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of causing injury to a child and she was sentenced to 15 years in jail.