The baby died an unimaginable death.
One of her lungs had collapsed. Her ribs were broken, her skull was fractured, her liver was nearly torn in half. But worst of all were the brain injuries 6-month-old Jamesha suffered when her mother allegedly exploded in a fit of rage and killed the infant by swinging her from her legs and repeatedly banging her head into the head of her twin sister, Jasmine.
“Terrible case,” Judge Nicholas R. Ford said sadly as the twins’ mother, 18-year-old Valerie Mays, stood before him to face first-degree murder charges just days after the baby died in August of 1999. “Horrible facts, horrible facts.”
As aberrant as little Jamesha’s case may seem, it is just one of a string of murders of infant girls that are winding their way toward trial in Cook County. And the cases, each shocking and gruesome in its own right, reflect a little-known and rarely publicized criminal statistic in the United States: A female is most likely to be the victim of homicide during her first year of life.
A U.S. Department of Justice analysis of national crime reports reveals that despite all the attention traditionally paid to stalking, domestic abuse and violent, sex-related attacks, females consistently run the highest risk of being murdered before they reach their first birthday than at any other age. And in nearly all of the cases, the suspects charged in the infants’ deaths are their parents, family friends or guardians, the very adults who should have been nurturing and protecting them.
“We tend to put all our focus on looking at the abuse of adults,” said Susan Howley, the director of public policy at the National Center for Victims of Crime. “But we’ve not been especially good at looking at the younger victims — especially the very youngest of them. And we can’t afford not to pay attention.”
Here is a look at a handful of such cases — cases grisly enough to elicit outrage from even the most seasoned attorneys and judges, cases that illustrate the complexities involved in investigating, prosecuting and preventing these baby girls’ deaths, cases that put tiny and all-too-real faces on the government’s statistics.
The first question people invariably ask when told that females are most likely to be murdered in their first 12 months is this: Does that mean baby girls are more likely to be killed than baby boys?
“No,” says Howard Snyder, the director of systems research for the National Center for Juvenile Justice. “That’s not the case. Baby girls and baby boys are murdered at about the same rate. But the difference for males is that their highest rates of homicide come later in life — when they are in their late teens or early 20s.”
Snyder says it makes sense that a male would be at greater risk when he is older, when he is interacting with the world and making decisions that put him in harm’s way, whether it be joining a gang, getting involved in a drug scene or committing crimes.
What is most heart-wrenching about the statistic regarding females is that infancy is a time when they are entirely innocent, unable to make choices and utterly defenseless, Snyder says.
“It’s terribly sad,” he notes.
In 1997, the most recent year for which the federal government has compiled and released statistics, the homicide rate for females under the age of 1 was 5.8 per 100,000.
Females never have another year as dangerous as their first.
Males, on the other hand, were most likely to be murder victims at about the age of 21, when their homicide rates soar to just over 35 per 100,000.
In the end, experts say, it’s nearly impossible to unravel the myriad social, economic and familial factors that lead to the tragic death of infants. But three factors seem to stand out among all the others: the vulnerability of the babies and their isolation from those who might help them; the increased presence of live-in boyfriends or girlfriends in the babies’ households; and the vast number of parents who are simply not emotionally, financially or intellectually prepared to deal with the rigors and demands of parenthood.
Babies require energy and time, and according to prosecutors, Stacey Samuels didn’t have much of either.
So after watching “Unsolved Mysteries” and learning that smothering deaths were the hardest to investigate and prosecute, Samuels, a 21-year-old drug abuser, allegedly placed a pillow over her 11-month-old daughter’s face.
Little Makayla struggled briefly before going limp, then regained consciousness several minutes later, according to court records.
Prosecutors allege that Samuels grabbed the pillow again, this time holding it over the baby’s face long enough to kill her.
In the first weeks after Makayla’s death last July 8, Samuels told police what seemed an unlikely story: that she had been quietly rocking Makayla when the baby suddenly went limp and stopped breathing.
Authorities didn’t buy the young mother’s claim, but with no witnesses or obvious injuries to the baby it seemed they would not be able to pursue charges.
According to the experts, herein lies the greatest challenge to investigators. Unlike homicides among adults — where nearly 50 percent of the time the victim is killed by a stranger wielding a knife or gun– some 85 percent of those who kill babies are parents and caregivers who use little more than their own hands as weapons.
“These are absolutely the hardest cases to prosecute,” says Rob Parrish, a former Utah prosecutor who is now a national child abuse expert and the deputy director of the National Center for Shaken Baby Syndrome. “In so many of these cases, there is no obvious wound and it’s very difficult to convince a jury without that.”
In an overwhelming majority of cases, infants are killed when left alone with people assumed to be trustworthy. According to government statistics, 54 percent of infants are slain by a parent, 6 percent by another family member and 25 percent by a friend of the family. Further complicating matters: People often are unlikely to turn in or suspect family and friends because they simply cannot fathom that someone they know and love would deliberately injure an innocent baby.
“I’ve prosecuted more of these cases than I care to remember,” Parrish says, “and in none of them have I had an eyewitness who was willing to cooperate or tell the truth on the stand. Often you have family members or wives or girlfriends or someone who is willing to go to great lengths to protect the perpetrator. In one case my only witness was a 4-year-old child, and at that age they can’t really verbalize what they’ve seen.”
In Samuels’ case, according to prosecutors, the young mother’s conscience was her undoing.
On July 24, barely two weeks after the baby’s death, Samuels walked to a pay phone in the 1900 block of 55th Street, called 911 and told the dispatcher between sobs that she had suffocated her baby and “could not keep it inside anymore,” according to court records. Two days later, she appeared in court to face first-degree murder charges.
“She knew that if she smothered the baby, she might get away with it,” Assistant State’s Atty. Allen Murphy told the judge. Murphy also said in court that Samuels had told police in her confession that Makayla had been interfering with her social life, an erratic existence filled with drug and alcohol consumption.
Prosecutors are still deciding whether they will seek the death penalty. But Samuels’ defense attorney is almost certain the young mother will enter an insanity plea.
“She’s extremely, extremely mentally ill,” says Assistant Public Defender Marijane Placek, “and in addition to that she was basically self-medicating with drugs and alcohol. Normally Stacey’s mother was there to supervise the care of the baby but on the afternoon in question she had stepped out, leaving Stacey and the child alone.”
Valerie Mays, the mother of twins Jamesha and Jasmine, was simply too young to be a good mother, say those who knew her.
Mays was just 17 when her daughters were born, and Beverly Bishop, an aunt of the twins’ father, initially took temporary custody of the infants. But when Mays turned 18 and the babies were 3 months old, Jamesha and Jasmine were turned over to their mother.
Still, Bishop — who had bonded with the twins whom she still refers to as “my babies” — found herself having to step in to ensure they were being cared for. Mays, Bishop said, would dump the babies with friends or other family so she “could go hang out on the streets and just play around.”
“I’d go see them and they’d be dirty or covered with mosquito bites or they’d be so hungry you could hear their bellies rumbling,” Bishop, 30, said. “So I’d take them for a few days, get everything back together, and then Valerie would come and take them back again.”
Yet for all the erratic parenting that Bishop said she had seen from Mays, nothing prepared her for the phone call she got at work on the afternoon of Aug. 8, 1999. A co-worker took the message: “The twins have been hurt.”
Jamesha and Jasmine had been taken to Mercy Hospital and Medical Center on Chicago’s South Side. Jamesha was pronounced dead at 4:51 p.m. Jasmine remained for several days in critical condition with a fractured skull before beginning to show signs of recovery.
Mays was arrested soon after. According to Assistant State’s Atty. Tisa Morris, the lead prosecutor on Mays’ case, the young mother made a videotaped confession. In her confession, Mays demonstrated how she had banged the babies’ heads together, according to prosecutors.
The defense offers a far different picture. “I’m not going to go into all the details of the case, but I can tell you that we do not believe the facts will turn out to be what the state is alleging,” said Mays’ attorney, Assistant Public Defender Dana Woodbury. “I do not believe their version of events will be what will bear out at trial.” As Mays’ trial approaches — prosecution and defense are currently battling over whether Mays’ confession should be shown to the jury — Bishop is expressing hope. Like many family members confronted with such a case, Bishop firmly refuses to believe Mays could be capable of such a crime.
“I have to believe she didn’t do this,” Bishop said, near tears. “I don’t know everything that happened, but I do know that Valerie was just too young to be a good mother. This is what happens when babies are having babies.”
Parrish says Bishop’s analysis might not be far from the truth.
“So many of our studies show a very clear correlation in the young age of a caregiver and the likelihood that they will cause [a] child harm,” he said. “They just aren’t mature enough and experienced enough. They often don’t respond rationally to months of decreased sleep and dirty diapers and to a baby that’s crying non-stop at 2 in the morning.”
Little Destiny Nelson was already in an ankle-to-chest cast from the previous week’s beating when her mother’s boyfriend allegedly swung her head into a door frame, killing her from blunt head trauma.
The autopsy on the 4-month-old was heart-breaking: a fractured skull, hemorrhaging of the brain, previously broken bones, including several tiny ribs. The man charged with Destiny’s murder was Nathaniel Stephens, 19, the sometime live-in boyfriend of the baby’s mother. After he had been charged with battery of the infant and released from jail on bond, he had promptly disregarded a court order to stay away from the child and her mother, according to county prosecutors.
Destiny’s case illustrates a worsening of an already disturbing trend: live-in boyfriends or girlfriends of a child’s biological parent who abuse or murder a child.
“What you often see is a live-in who wants a relationship with the parent but not with the child,” Parrish says. “And so that is the stress and it often ends in the worst possible way.”
Though Parrish knows of no national studies that have been done looking at all forms of infant homicide, he said that the statistics for shaken baby syndrome — when a baby is shaken so violently it is fatal — indicate that in 21 percent of cases the perpetrator is a live-in boyfriend.
Stephens is being held in Cook County Jail without bond, charged with Destiny’s Nov. 5, 2001, murder. He also faces charges of aggravated battery of a child for allegations that he severely beat Destiny the week before her death, resulting in the full-body cast. He has pleaded not guilty in both cases, and the baby’s mother — whom authorities say still may be charged with endangerment for leaving Destiny alone with Stephens even after he had allegedly beaten her before — has lost custody of her other children.
Experts say the case might be shocking, but it isn’t unique.
“The first two child murder cases I ever prosecuted were both [committed by] live-in boyfriends,” Parrish says. “The scenario is all too real and all too common.”
For now, the statistics for baby girls remain grim.
“Until we see a change in the familial factors that are leading to these deaths, the numbers are not going to drop,” Snyder says. “It’s just a depressing reflection of the world we live in.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently issued a report whose data dovetails with the Department of Justice’s. According to the CDC, the risk of getting murdered is greatest during the first year of life for both males and females prior to the age of 17. Moreover, murdered infants are most likely to be killed during their first week of life, and 82 percent of those slayings occur on the very day of the child’s birth.
Beverly Bishop, the aunt who temporarily cared for twins Jamesha and Jasmine, still mourns the little girl who died and the little girl who now lives in a DCFS-approved home.
“Oh, do I miss my babies,” she said, “miss them like there aren’t words to explain. I just visited Jasmine the other day and, I tell you, she is the sweetest thing. Almost 3 years old now.”
Bishop said that although it is unclear how much Jasmine will be neurologically affected by her head injuries as an infant, the bright-eyed toddler seems to be doing well for now.
“She says her numbers and some of her letters and she just jabbers away to everyone,” Bishop said proudly.
“It’s like she has no idea what happened to her back then — like she has no idea what became of her little twin sister.”
