ST. PAUL — A St. Paul woman who is accused of drowning her 6-year-old daughter in a bathtub believing she was shielding the child from abuse was charged Wednesday with second-degree murder.

The charges against 25-year-old Kayla Marie Jones say she told police that she hadn’t slept for two days and that she had accused her boyfriend of sexually abusing the child.

Jones said she was herself molested as a child and that she held her clothed daughter under water in the bathtub to “save her from this world,” according to the complaint.

Jones was scheduled to appear in court Wednesday and prosecutors were seeking to hold her on $2 million bail. There was no indication she has an attorney or has been assigned a public defender.

“The actions of the defendant are both chilling and heartbreaking,” Ramsey County Attorney John Choi said in a written statement. “We will pursue the appropriate level of justice in this case.”

A second-degree charge carries the possibility of a 40-year maximum prison sentence.

The boyfriend, who is not named in the complaint, has not been charged in the death. He is not the girl’s father, according to the Ramsey County attorney’s office. He had been out of the apartment at the time of the death, according to charging papers, and he was crying and screaming in disbelief when responding officers approached him at the scene.

Ramsay County attorney’s office said there was no immediate indication that Jones’ allegations of abuse against her boyfriend were valid.

A preliminary autopsy found that girl had hemorrhages in the tissues around her eyes and a scratch mark on her neck. She also suffered multiple internal injuries in the homicide, officially ruled a drowning.

Jones surrendered to police when they responded to a 911 call early Tuesday at her apartment building. The charging papers say her clothes were wet and she showed no emotion.

Emergency personnel tended to the young girl who wasn’t breathing. She was pronounced dead at a hospital.