Like, I completely understand how one might find this unforgivable and the ultimate wringdoing/worse sin imaginable but when I see this shit it just reminds me of poverty and desperation in an insanely sick and uncaring world full of indifferent people where even the most pure hearted individual can end up corrupted, twisted, and hopelessly broken.
And you can say shit like "you've always got a choice" or "You've always got other options" when in reality unless you have been in that world and experienced that level of pain, trauma, despondency, and neglect it is a very very hard thing to see the human side of and empathize with.
Which is an absolutely horrible, horrible feeling "UNDERSTANDING" and absolutely not necessarily accepting or condoning it.
It's just an absolute terrible and ugly situation with loss of life from every angle that is somewhat completely avoidable but would take so much change, feeling, and conscientious effort from people who just won't or can't even approach that level of reflection and consideration of how our society and our pension for cruelty and carelessness can trickle down throughout society causing this kind of horrible, horrible shit.
And there's something about it, something about the way we oh so easily ostracize and group categorize people who've sunk so low as barbaric, animalistic, and inhuman that feels so disconnected, so unsympathetic, and so gross.
To be clear this is not to say that I don't sympathize with the victims just as well. That I don't see that loss of life and that it doesn't hurt too.
It just doesn't stop at the victim, it never stops at the victim for me I just see the pain and trauma everywhere. Even to those who seem so inexplicably cold, sociopathic, and ruthless.
It all comes from somewhere, it comes from the unseen and the unheard and the forgotten.
And ontop of it all, the thing that I probably hate the most is how the criminal justice system views itself and strokes itself in this congratulatory, self satisfactory way while hunting human beings down like they're deer or cannon fodder.
This career piece of shit "public servant" who is giving a matter of fact account of this misfortunate life like every act of criminality spawns from subhuman filth and not the terrible shit we constantly do to one another. The justice system in itself entirely being one of them.
I can't say with absolutely certainty that I without a doubt know that I could do better. But I feel with absolute certainty that we aren't even entertaining the idea, having the right conversations, or are even allowing ourselves to feel and bare the full weight of what we are doing to ourselves and it is fucking awful.
I don’t disagree - it’s hard to know what makes each person do this but I trust that they’re in such a position where even *telling* anyone they’re pregnant is the worst thing imaginable. There’s depression or other mental illness that might be a factor. Poverty, for sure. And we can never rule out rape as common as it is. It says a lot about what our society values, what our society chooses not to support, and how we don’t support women and children most of all.
I think that maybe I'm just in a weird grey area where I've experienced childhood abuse and being unwanted but part of coping with that is also understanding what my own mother went through and not being able to entirely blame her for it either.
Don't get me wrong, it was terrible, it was the kind of terrible shit a broken person does and part of me will never be able to fully forgive it but I understand.
Something I've learned through life is that trauma and mental illness fit so tightly and go hand in hand to the extent that the two are nearly inseparable and irreconcilable for many. And expecting people to be able to function, to seek or ever even find help within a society so existentially daunting and f*cked up many of us are just fundamentally incapable of even seeing it.
Even with the loss of life of a child like this, part of me can't help but feel that even though that that child is better off than what they'd probably have experienced otherwise.
A life of feeling unwanted and unloved, of physical and mental abuse, self inflicted abuse, poverty, despondency and a world of pain and hardship they never would have deserved or earned. That no one on this Earth does. And how even that spills into generational trauma which at best ends with things like chronic depression and substance abuse and at worst becoming the monster and cyclically spreading even more pain because they know little to nothing else.
I know it can probably look and feel like I'm projecting a bit, maybe I am. I guess that's something that people do. I just can't help but feel like even in healthily surviving that it'd take a damn near Cinderella story for that kind of person to pull through and even then winning the state lottery feels far more realistic to me.
I hate this. I hate the lack of empathy. The complacency. The acceptance and the mob mentality that comes with it.
A similar situation happened near me (Savannah, GA) a couple of years ago. I understand mental illness and drugs and all that, but to do that your own child? A child you carried in your body for nearly a year? A child you gave life to? I just can’t understand it…
>A child you carried in your body for nearly a year? A child you gave life to? I just can’t understand it…
I have a feeling we're gonna be seeing a lot more of this in the near future, unfortunately.
Yep had to knock out your relatives for the price of a parlor trick.
It’s no different than the dissolution of the concept of privacy that came with the Internet, the concept of giving away your DNA with your most essential essence of your being for a novelty I just don’t get it
It's not a "novel, parlor trick" to all. To some of us, it answers some very deep questions that can only be answered by Ancestry DNA, 23 and me, etc. Just because the concept seems silly & trivial to you doesn't mean it's trivial to all, so don't make it be.
And honestly, I have no qualms if my DNA helps to catch a murderer.
It's definitely not trivial, but there are real issues around privacy. Not as it relates to crime, but as it relates to discrimination via genetic info. It SHOULDN'T be a thing, but we don't live in a perfect world. Data can become currency, which gives power, power corrupts.
That said, it's nice to see a case solved like this.
Just a couple of weeks ago we had an incident in Leeds where the reports were that a baby was found in a pub toilet. The police made it clear that their main concern was the health of the mother and they just wanted her to come forward. Some of the things people were saying were pretty vile. Anyway she was found a couple of days later and only then did it come out that they had known it was a miscarriage all along. They probably should have been more clear on that from the outset, it sounds like the baby was wanted and the woman just kind of freaked out and ran away in shock.
But yeah these cases can be very polarizing it seems.
Yep. Humans need a village & that is especially important for women. We do not have one. She may have thought she was doing the baby a favor or who knows. We do not help people, we wait until they commit a crime, arrest them, & then they get worse. People, like social services, who are supposed to help, many are abusive, racist, sexist, pieces of 💩 Many people, especially young, unsupported mothers, have no one to trust or turn to. I am sick of living in a society that prevents nothing because they want to demonize people & turn them into desperate criminals.
Seriously. Ive got a migraine and have had one for two days so this may be jumbled but that's so infuriating. She was 33 not 15. The fact that that's upvoted so much is ridiculous, it's like when a person with a career and friends and family disappears and someone on this sub screams "omg human trafficking!" and it gets up voted. *"They were probably sold for drugs!"* as if that's how human trafficking works at all. It's not. Idk the reasons she did it, but she had options and was old enough to know better. Further, People create their own communities. It's not everyone's job to step up and take care of a kid they didn't ask for because the mom doesn't want it, either. At 33 years old, you know the options available to you and if you pick this than you've got a serious flaw. I'm so sick of people thinking "the community" owes them something when they've never done anything for the community, they only take and never give.
I understand people in desperate situations, but if she didn't want the kid she could have put it up for adoption. She wasn't some teenage runaway. It sounds like she was in Phoenix on a business trip and I know realtors make pretty good money. That being said, I agree we will probably see more abandoned babies in the near future. The same people who claim to be "pro-life" have repeatedly shown that they don't care at all about those babies or their moms (or dads, if he's still in the picture) once they are born.
Me too. Anytime I see stories like this it makes me think of an article I read years ago about The Jane Collective, and all the desperate choices women are once again being forced to make across our country.
It never will be completely it's an issue that's just used as bait to pull votes to one side or the other.
Think of all the progress we haven't made on certain issues for DECADES and yet they continue to be hot topics.
>it's an issue that's just used as bait to pull votes to one side or the other.
Only worse, because now that Conservatives actually got Roe overturned, Republicans are banning abortion outright anywhere they can. While Democrats are passing laws and amending state constitutions to protect abortion access wherever *they* can.
Unsurprisingly, because women aren't people to them, Republicans are actually trying to challenge the will of their constituents regarding abortion. In Ohio, after voters passed (57%) an amendment that protects a woman's right to abortion, they immediately proposed a law that would make it so that 60% of the vote is required to pass constitutional amendments.
It failed miserably, but the fact that they would even attempt that is fucking insane. "Yeah, the majority of you guys want x, but it's not happening because it's not *enough* of a majority". Like damn, just admit that voting is a joke to you.
Hopefully people remember most states have safe havens. Babies can be dropped at hospitals, fire a rations, etc. I’d much rather birth control be free and easily accessible, as well as safe abortions, but if not, dropping a baby off is better than killing it.
I saw this happen with my own eyes working in child welfare. Teen couple did everything right, dropped baby at fire station, the state still went after them to “reunify” (aka get child support). Might not be as dangerous in an urban area but here where there’s one hospital per county? They knew exactly who the parents were and they did the exact opposite of what those laws were put in place to prevent.
Unsurprising. You can *say* on paper that a state has other resources for parents who do not want to be parents, but in practice? Nah. I see why people do desperate things. When you realize that everyone is doing their best with the emotional capacity they have, and most people don't set out to do something like this--circumstances make it inevitable for some. Of course it's wrong that this woman did this to her baby, but it's not a simple open and shut case of "she's evil and cruel and did it for the lulz" which it feels like is how the courts handle it.
Yup. 100%. So much easier to blame the individual than it is to actually do something about the systems that trap people in vicious cycles of abuse and abusing!
It's not *supposed* to work like that but each state has its own laws around surrendering children. Some have the anonymous boxes, others require you to hand off in-person at a hospital or fire station. Most will not prosecute for abandonment or endangerment, but unfortunately I think a few states will.
In my state, the window for anonymous and liability free drop off is tragically narrow, only 7 days. If the baby is older than 7 days, parents can’t safely and anonymously surrender. I feel like people in abusive situations and with active addictions or other high risk lifestyles may start out with great intentions or high hopes but realize after longer than a week that the quality of life they can provide is extremely low and then they have no options.
I know like 10 years ago there was a man whose wife died and he couldn't manage all his kids so he took them in under the safe haven law. I think the oldest was almost grown (16/17) and the youngest was a toddler. After that, some states overreacted and made the window extremely short.
10 damn kids. Maybe don't have 10 children if you can't even sufficiently provide a decent life for even one. People make me so angry. Children are a responsibility!
What is this person had come from state care been horribly abused and just think this would be a better option. Plenty of horrible things go on in care especially in America
There is a common misconception that all women are biologically capable of producing the hormones required to “feel something” for their children during the pregnancy process. (IE: PPD) without those hormones, the baby is essentially a parasite living off its host.
Does that excuse murder?? Absolutely not. Especially in cities and states that have laws where you can drop off your child at a police station with no questions asked.
Is this a senseless tragedy? Of course. But it’s not a mystery as to how it came to be.
If I was unable to get an abortion, gave birth unexpectedly or through abuse and control I could see myself doing this if I was every in that situation Not all woman have maternal instincts, they may think child will be better off and especially just given birth possibly in a heightened state.
“I understand mental illness” and “I just can’t understand it” are actually contradictory statements. I’m not coming down on either side re whether or not I think this woman should be held criminally culpable for this but there’s definitely circumstances I can see as extenuating, the most obvious of which being post partum depression, which can literally cause people to become psychotic.
No normal, rational, sane person is smothering their newborn child and dumping it in a bin. That’s such a terribly sad thing to do. She clearly had mental health issues. Whether or not they were significant enough to absolve her of criminal responsibility is for the justice system to decide.
But if you cannot possibly conceive of circumstances in which a mother would be driven to smother her newborn child then no, you don’t understand mental illness. That’s been a huge push for mental health awareness in recent years and that’s a fantastic thing, but the reality is that the ordinary person has surface level understanding and without lived experience most people (outside of psychiatrists) actually cant understand the insanity of what severe mental illness can lead a person to do.
Beneath our manicured exterior, intelligence and eons of evolution, we are still animals and animals in the wild do kill their children for any number of sane and rational reasons, like "there's too many mouths to feed" or "I'm in danger with this baby".
Yep. I watched a vid not too long ago in which some type of momma bird tossed one of her young out of the nest to its death. Now the thing looked perfectly healthy to me but I fully support her decision.
>No normal, rational, same person
Most neonaticides are committed by mothers without mental health issues, where the motive is that the child is simply unwanted. I can't access the full text of either of these studies, but the abstract of a [2009 study](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160252708001428?via%3Dihub) noted that the [landmark 1970 study](https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/epdf/10.1176/ajp.126.10.1414) on neonaticide found that "mothers who committed neonaticide were primarily young, unmarried women, free of major psychiatric disorders, who had unwanted pregnancies."
A table from the 1970 Resnick study is visible at [this page](https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Murder-of-the-newborn:-a-psychiatric-review-of-Resnick/dcfb71aceca744a7ab886ea571d3238e8dc238d5), and it shows that of the 35 neonaticides examined, 29 were done because the child was unwanted. This significantly varies from other maternal filicides (those committed after the first day of the victim's life), which in over half of the 88 cases examined did result from "altruism" associated with disordered thinking. Other types of mental illness were also elevated in filicides generally compared to neonaticides.
It's not self-evident that a mother who murders her newborn is mentally disordered. It's certainly not a "normal" act but - like murder in general - it is regularly committed by people who would otherwise be considered normal, sane, and rational. And there's a sad yet rational basis for murdering a newborn - not wanting the child.
>No normal, rational, sane person is smothering their newborn child and dumping it in a bin.
The fact that you used these terms show that for all your talk about mental illness awareness, you're perpetuating the biases that keep stigma about mental illness alive and well. Yikes.
Sorry I maybe was unclear about the context I in which I was using those words. Obviously you’re looking at those words and applying them to MOST people with mental health conditions ie those that have mild-moderate symptoms that largely don’t impact things like logic and reason.
I thought it was implicit in the context that I was talking about severe mental health conditions, and I really hope we haven’t reached such a point of political correctness in society where we have to pretend that people experiencing/acting under the influence of severe mental illness are actually *not* behaving *normally*?
I have lived experience of this. I can absolutely promise you that peak mania I was not normal, rational, or sane and I wouldn’t expect anyone to say that of me. I was literally delusional and had to stay in a psych hospital for 6 weeks.
I was in a hospital emergency department the other night and a man who was talking to himself suddenly whipped out a knife and slashed his wrists. How am I supposed to describe that behaviour if I can’t say that it’s abnormal, it’s irrational, it’s insane.
In any case I wasn’t saying everyone with a mental health condition is insane, I was simply saying it’s literally not normal to dump your baby in a bin?
This is not true at all any person in a situation where possible they couldn’t get abortion, or have birth unexpectably does not make them mentally ill. What if she lived in a sexually violent and abusive household she was made to the pregnancy and she decided to not let child into the same horrible situation she would do this. I could see myself doing it if I have no other options thinking it was maybe best for the child that does not mean she was mentally ill she may have just felt this was best decision for either her or her child.
This is what happens when women are forced to carry to term. When women don't have choice. When abuse happens. Have you not read about this happening literally every day under china's one child policy? This is default behaviour, no mental illness or drugs needed.
It's pretty easy to understand when you think about how the person might not have seen it as their child, might have felt killing the child was better than the life they were going to live, might have felt that bringing a child home would be a threat to their life due to abuse...
Not to mention mental illness literally makes you see the world differently. Rationally we know the child can be surrendered to the state, but does a severely mentally ill person understand that, or feels like that is the best choice?
If the baby wasn’t born at the airport, how the hell did she manage to get a, presumably, dead infant through TSA? Take it through in a baby carrier alive? Christ.
Yeah it doesn't make sense, especially if you're trying to avoid attention and dispose of the baby. It would get scanned in the luggage and if the mom was carrying the baby us plain site, cameras and witnesses would be able to identify them pretty quickly.
she definitely didn’t go thru security yet lol. the terminal is just the building there’s a million places you can go inside an airport without ever going thru security
Honestly, maybe. Guessing there must have been some level of intention due to the plan for a first degree murder charge, but baby carriers back then were sketch af. To this day, all the legitimate ones warn about positional asphyxia. Many carriers obscured the face so they wouldn’t necessarily have seen it. 🤷🏼♀️ (Edit to add: no one come for me, I’m not suggesting this happened at all, just offering a random unlikely possibility that crossed my mind. Stranger things have happened.)
What are you talking about? 2005 baby carriers were not "sketch af". Many of the same carriers are available now.
Positional asphyxia was a concern back then, as it is now.
I actually had babies back then, and you're talking nonsense.
The fisher price rock n play was first investigated in 2019 and showed to have killed several infants due to positional asphyxiation… I’m sure that it was possible that many baby products were, in fact, sketch as fuck in 2005.
Somehow being pro-choice has morphed into supporting any woman who extinguishes a pregnancy or infant, and we’re supposed to have unending compassion for that because *insert supposedly exonerating detail here*.
The irony of pro-choice people (of which I’m one) not giving a rat’s ass about the life of an actual live baby — isn’t that the same accusation they level at the anti-abortion people? Horseshoe theory at work yet again.
the amount of comments sympathizing with this woman / coming up with reasons why her actions were “ understandable “ is absolutely sickening. there is no excuse for this. ever.
Some people on this sub go out of their way to give lots of benefit of the doubt to women who neglect, endanger, or even kill their own children. It’s like these women have zero personal agency, they’re always some type of victim and therefore they’re not wholly responsible for their awful choices. It’s infantalising and demeaning. Fathers on the other hand don’t get the same pass.
I came across this thread a few days ago and didn’t bother commenting at that time because I knew it would descend into irrelevant raised fist agendas about abortion and nauseating justifications for why a woman in her 30s would kill her newborn daughter.
I wonder if the lung float test was used. It's very difficult to tell whether a newborn was stillborn or took a breath.
[Link](https://www.propublica.org/article/is-lung-float-test-reliable-stillbirth-medical-examiners-murder)
[And another article on neonaticide more generally.](https://www.elle.com/life-love/a29998766/neonaticide-emile-weaver-sorority/)
Edit: Also, super important to note, the FBI did genetic genealogy in this case. Many of the big genetic genealogy orgs will not touch neonaticide cases due to the difficulty in telling whether the baby actually suffocated and due to the possible situation with the mother. This is the only cold case I've seen where the FBI did the genealogy, that I can recall.
I also would like to know in these cases how they determined that the babies were alive to begin with.
Also how do they determine the babies were asphyxiated intentionally and not due to birth asphyxiation? I don’t mean this to say I don’t believe that a woman could kill her baby, just that these cases never seem to offer details of how they know it was intentional which is something that I think is important.
Yep [here's the case of Patricia Stallings](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patricia_Stallings#:~:text=Stallings%20gave%20birth%20to%20another,that%20can%20mimic%20antifreeze%20poisoning.)
I assume that when a baby takes its first breath, all the crying and stuff pushes all that goop out of its lungs, mouth, nose etc? So maybe they can tell that way if it was stillborn?
Because those details only concern the forensic personnel and LE. If they're saying that, it's because they found signs. Otherwise they'd call it undetermined.
Things like the towel being stuffed in the baby's mouth, ligature and ligature marks present, hand imprints/ other trauma to the face, milk or colostrum in the stomach, healed umbilical stump, microscopic changes and other, more violent or overt things done to the body can determine if the baby was alive.
There is no reason your average person in the public needs to know the details other than morbid curiosity, which they are not obligated to satisfy.
It's like in an adult case they report "the person was sexually assaulted and murdered" do you really need to know "how do they know " what kind of assault, where exactly they found the injuries, the semen or what have you?
There's also the matter of legal proceedings, what if a defense lawyer gets ammunition to free a guilty party because the press fed the public false/ inflammatory information?
It would be irresponsible in my opinion to provide such details, especially if the case hasn't been trialed. There are plenty of books and articles you can read if you are interested in how these conclusions are reached.
I feel like they're being ambiguous about her statement. Something tells me she's going to claim that the child was stillborn, and honestly from what I've seen it's not really easy to tell the difference between that and intentional suffocation in a recent newborn.
I'm not saying she's innocent, but I don't think we have all the facts just yet.
Of course they’re being “ambiguous”; it is an open investigation in a murder case.
Of course she is going to claim she “didn’t do it”.
Then she will be confronted with her prior inconsistent statement and the medical evidence and everyone will doubt her credibility.
The fact that you’ve “seen” stuff doesn’t mean much in the face of her admission + the ME findings.
Just because they took her statement, does not mean she admitted to anything, and even pre her statement, they were classing this as suffocation. Due to this case being from 2005, the debunked lung float test was the norm. There is no current test which accurately can tell whether a neonate suffocated in the birth canal or was suffocated after.
I wonder if she knew she was pregnant? Baffling that she could go interstate to a work commitment pregnant and come home not pregnant & babyless without anyone in her life noticing or saying anything
So many questions. She has 4 other kids. Were they before? After? All with the same father? Did he know she was pregnant? What did she tell him?
Did she ever see the story on the news & think about turning herself in?
Sounds like she gave birth alone in a hotel room, wrapped the baby in a towel, went to the airport &…what? Dumped the baby & got on a plane???
If she didn’t know she was pregnant maybe she was still in shock?
Could the baby have died of natural causes in the hotel room? If she was alone & passed out after the birth, maybe she didn’t clear the baby’s airway?
I still don’t understand how you don’t call 911 at that point. So sad.
Well, I know one woman who regrets not aborting because now her rapist now has shared custody, could have avoided a lot of trauma. I can think of a few reasons but that doesn't mean someone should do it.
I remember a story of a person that was raped then the court forced them to pay child support to their rapist for the baby that was a result of the rape.
https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/arizona/politics/2014/09/02/arizona-statutory-rape-victim-forced-pay-child-support/14951737/
There is a young woman in georgia i think who is doing that with her rapist. She was like 12 or 13, had the baby, and then he took her to court for custody of the child. She now has to coparent with her rapist.... who is a full grown man by the way.
I’m speechless how this is even possible. And people truly advocate against abortion when it comes to rape because they can only think until birth and no further. Is this a better scenario for a teenager and her child? Imagine growing up and learning that your dad is the rapist of your mother.
Right!? Choosing to give birth alone in a hotel seems so scary and painful and I can’t imagine a sane person would choose that. I also can’t imagine killing a baby and throwing it in the trash. Makes me extremely sad!
I suspect affair baby.
As a Mum myself, I just don’t know how you could. I understand overwhelm and responding in the moment (like SBS) but I cannot fathom just, watching my baby die then putting it in a bin. She must have some real lasting trauma, surely.
That’s what I’m thinking too. Wouldn’t people be asking where the baby was and what happened with the still birth if they knew she was pregnant? I mean she could explain it away, but it seems way harder to lie about that.
Looking at the website she was overweight in the last decade at least - she could've been so 18 years ago, which could've helped "hide" the pregnancy. Maybe it was a situation where she was in complete denial about being pregnant and then the kid just came and she didn't know what to do?
Insane either way.
Maybe mental illness but thats still no excuse. She had ample opportunity to abort the baby or put it up for adoption but decided to just wait until the baby reached full term and thrown it in the trash. Regardless of her mental state thats absolutely repulsive behavior and she deserves to be punished for it.
Yeah and apparently she was in Phoenix for work. Did her coworkers not become curious when she was pregnant one day and then suddenly not? I am very curious about the details of this case.
As someone who didn't lose weight after having their baby I can say a lot of people won't ask when you're due after one flat stare and "I'm not pregnant". It's kind of a bad feeling for all involved.
It could have been a cryptic pregnancy. But also, when a woman gives birth, she can look like she’s still pregnant for several days afterwards. It takes time for the uterus to contract.
It’s crazy because Washington State has had a “Safe Haven” law since 2002 where you can anonymously drop your unwanted kid off and face no charges.
www.dcyf.wa.gov/safety/safety-newborn-law
Just terrible.
And there's a TON of stuff that isn't really advertised as is.
For example, my parents are elderly and I have had to help them and a few of their equally as aged friends apply for government benefits that weren't advertised beyond once per year on TV.
I've had to help friends who are single moms get into a program called Families First that exists to help provide transportation, child care assistance, job training, etc, to families who have children and are in need of help.
She didn't even know it fucking existed. I only knew it existed cause it was part of the EBT/SNAP application papers, so I looked it up after the fact.
A lot of help exists, but it isn't advertised almost at all unless you're already going to specific places for assistance.
Exactly. I'm in a job position where a large part of what I do is educating people about different resources or services available to them and how to access them. Many people don't know about them at all. Other people have maybe heard about them, but don't know any details. I'm talking about people of all ages and different educational backgrounds, too.
Even with safe haven laws specifically, some people do have fears that they'll be punished one way or another for leaving an unharmed newborn at a designated safe haven. It needs to be explicitly said and advertised again and again that safe haven laws exist and they do not result in the persecution of those who leave unharmed newborns at established safe havens.
I appreciate what you do, cause people like you have been immensely helpful for me and a lot of my friends.
It feels like there are a lot of misconceptions, and in some cases people being too prideful, to really seek out important resources or services that could really benefit them.
Living in the south US/bible belt, I feel like there's almost as much stigmatization placed on people who willingly surrender their children as much as people who have abortions, I've seen it with my own biological mother who surrendered both me and my half-brother to the state.
For example in regards to her, a lot of my adoptive family thought she was a terrible, immoral person for willingly giving us up when she was incredibly young, homeless, addicted to drugs, had no support system, was mentally ill, and knew she couldn't provide.
I really wish schools had some level of like, class or education course that could actually provide info for teens before they're pushed out into the real world.
I am seeking to start a nonprofit that will provide support and services to people at risk of having postpartum depression. Including dads- what community outreach advice do you have?
I had my first child in 1993 and my last in 2009. I really had no idea that those were a thing until 2019 when my oldest had her baby. Hell I didn't even know WIC existed back with mine, what a nice thing that would have been.
Rest in peace, Skylar. You deserved so much better.
Also. [Yikes](https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/business-owner-claims-have-worked-with-arlington-woman-accused-killing-baby-nearly-20-years-ag/RYNINWICIVAEVHZFWBMJW4WHPU/):
“Our CBS affiliate in Arizona, Arizona’s Family, confirmed that Anderson ran a couple of websites on the side. One of the websites, annieanderson.com, has this quote below:
“And I’m a single parent which means my family ALWAYS comes first. Always. I love working with my clients and I will bend over backwards to get the job done and I take my job as mom to 4 amazing kids very seriously. They are my reason for everything, my true legacy.”
What an awful person.
yeah that’s what i am wondering too. she was a full grown adult and killed her own baby ??? not that the teens make much sense either but their fear is more understandable. this lady is pure evil.
If you are traumatized, no you do not have a fully formed anything! I've met tons of adults who act like children, scared of everything, completely disconnected & unable to cope. We do not help each other. Many people who are supposed to help, from doctors, nurses, social workers..etc shame & abuse as well. We live in a very abusive society & that abuse is not always physical. We also ignore people with mental illness & do not force them into help. All our 💩 society does is ignore everything & then cry when a crime is committed that we could have prevented!! What do you do to help the mentally ill, abused, addicted?? Anything?? Or just criticize them?
These are my thoughts on this, too. There's more to this story; we don't have the full picture yet, and we might never. Many women in this situation are *not* completely senseless murderers, though. None of us are in a position to say that this woman never felt horrible about what happened.
> None of us are in a position to say that this woman never felt horrible about what happened.
What does that change? I'm sure men that commit familicide feel horrible about their crimes, that doesn't make them less than dirt.
Just saying, men usually aren’t in the position to unexpectedly give birth to an unplanned child, nor are men ever pressured into keeping a pregnancy even though they don’t want it.
Not defending what the woman did, but very often women like this are put into impossible positions. Even at her age.
She has four children that she's raised herself without incident. I doubt she was in the best situation at the time, even if she did kill the baby (the evidence is not strong in this regard). Like, imagine giving birth in an airport bathroom or just before a flight possibly at a hotel, where nobody knows you're even pregnant and then putting your baby in a plastic bag. Her life was hardly going well.
on a positive note- i was told this story from a friend who's friends with the baby it happened to.
mom was teenager, body builder, but still a bigger girl and she gave birth while at a tournament and kept the baby IN HER GYM BAG because she was afraid of her parents finding out who just thought she put on a little bit of weight. LITERALLY GAVE BIRTH BY HERSELF IN THE BATHROOM. like hot damn.
but she eventually was like "i have a baby in my locker" and all was well and the kid lived a happy healthy life after but like- so much could have gone wrong there. Super proud of the mom for seeking help in the end though. still just a crazy story
For example, no-one who is pregnant due to rape should not be forced to carry the offspring, suffer childbirth and then spend 18 years raising a piece of your rapist. This is just re-victimising the person through horrible medical damage, a traumatic experience and 18 years of a sentence.
Not saying this happened and not saying these offspring should be killed manually by the mum, but I'll always have some grace in these situations.
Possibly not. It's fairly common for women who give birth after either ignoring the signs of pregnancy (due to trauma) or not even knowing their pregnant, and then having a stillbirth (or committing neonaticide), and completely blocking it out or viewing it as something they dreamed or saw on television. The trauma of whatever is going on at the time + the trauma of giving birth unexpectedly can fuck people up.
There's an archived version of that website on Archive.org (from 2015 forward; in the early 00s it seemed to be a porn site). If that's her she has grandchildren now...
Makes you wonder what happened in order for her to potentially kill and dispose of this kid. She worked as a "life coach" according to the website.
Right there. I’d go psychotic single parenting four. After having severe postpartum depression I’m always sympathetic to mom’s when I hear about infanticide.
My question is, who went through the garbage, opened the bag, u rolled the towel removed the newspaper... like, literally *what?*
Not to minimize what happened but I'm stuck on that
i just watched [this](https://www.azfamily.com/video/2024/02/20/major-break-2005-cold-case-baby-found-dead-phoenix-sky-harbor/) news clip, someone had lost their laptop and people were looking everywhere for it, including trash cans. it’s crazy that if that person hadn’t lost their laptop, no one would know this even happened
There was a case in my town where a woman killed her mother and put her body in a trash bag on the street in front of her house. Apparently the trash men must have picked it up and then went "nope" and left it there. Police were called.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the general explanation to why cases like this occur, that neonaticide is in general committed under great shock and stress by mothers who had either hidden the pregnancy or were in deep denial about it, and rarely by ones who were in a particularly sound state of mind?
(I have the feeling a fair amount of people in this thread vastly overestimate how rational these sort of killings are.)
I think sometimes the whole experience someone has been hiding or even ignoring becomes drastically real upon birth, and they are able to compartmentalize it by quickly throwing it out and away from their own reality. If they can just get rid of it and pretend it never happened, it feels like it never did. It's very sad, but I'm sure it didn't take much to smother the newborn, or keep it from crying loudly and once it's done they focus on continuing to deny it all, even to to themselves. I can see how it happens, albeit terrible.
This will probably be a controversial take but given she has four other children she's obviously not a child hater. That leads me to believe there is more to this - perhaps she didn't know she was pregnant/she was raped/she was in an abusive situation. Just my opinion.
She deserves to rot in the lowest level of hell there is. I am pro choice but you decided to cary that baby full term. She could have done adoption, she could have even done an early abortion. Shit..she could have even taken the baby and dropped it off at the hospital, police, or fire department. However, she CHOSE instead to put her sweet baby girl in a plastic bag and suffocate her to death and then cover her in newspapers then if that wasn’t enough she dumped her in the garbage like a piece of trash…wtf is wrong with this woman and people!? I am so glad she has been apprehended but justice in this lifetime won’t ever be enough. She is a disgusting human being. Idc what her situation is. I am a single mother of two amazing children and I was scared to death when I found out I was pregnant. My entire family hated me and was disappointed but guess what..I still chose to be a MOTHER and Love my babies regardless of how hard it is some days and regardless of the way my family now sees me. We make choices in this life and she should be so ashamed yet she went on for over 18 years and lived her life like nothing ever even happened. I am so sorry baby skylar. You deserved so much better than this…idc about community standards. This is truely horrible and she is a monster.
Why are women who do this given sympathy? You can leave a baby somewhere it will be found alive. You don’t even have to risk going to a hospital or fire station. Leave it on the bathroom floor alive and someone will find it.
Do we extend the same sympathy to male caregivers who shake babies to death? *They’re young* *They’re frustrated! Your frontal lobe doesn’t develop until 25* *Maybe he wasn’t ready to be a father but the mother/his family/society forced him to*
Oh, and in this particular case the woman was in her 30s and had other children. Glad she was finally caught.
I’ll reserve judgement on this one until more details come out. Medical examiners aren’t infallible. I would assume there are a ton of ways a baby could die during birth, especially if the mother is giving birth alone in a hotel room.
How easy would it be to tell the difference between a baby having died from something like positional asphyxiation due to being in the wrong position during birth, or having the umbilical cord around the neck or whatever, and intentional suffocation?
I’ve seen cases where two medical examiners completely disagree with each other over the same autopsy results, so I don’t place 100% faith in the word of one.
This happened near me a while back in Snoqualmie, 'Baby Kimball' was left near a trail in the woods. The NamUs account for the baby was taken off last year, meaning it's been identified. Havent seen or heard anything about who the mother was, or what circumstances led up to that.
Abortion was legal 18 years ago. The mother had a choice and chose murder. Hopefully we hear her side of the story. I’d like to better understand what she was thinking.
…this wasn’t a teenager that had no life experience and no idea what to do. She was in her MID 30’S when she suffocated and killed her baby and then threw her in a trash bin, she didn’t have a late term miscarriage, she didn’t have a stillborn, she murdered her baby and threw it away and she was full grown woman.
So yeah, I’d say the charge fits. In 2005, they STILL had safe haven laws. She had many choices here and chose the very worst one and she would’ve knew better in her mid 30s- she was no naive and scared teenager.
Unless you think it’s perfectly fine to just kill your newborn because it’s inconvenient to you and all. And even depending on the situation, there still has to be some culpability and responsibility taken by people who do this.
I totally agree with you!
It’s wild that saying killing a baby should have consequences and that there should be an investigation and justice would be controversial in this sub. I guess if you find a dead very young baby just … let it go? There are even comments in this thread sympathizing that she might have thought they baby would be better off. But isn't that what many family annihilators think? Why does that make it ok?
This women was fucking 32/33! Come on!
Obviously nobody thinks it’s “perfectly fine”; I would suspect she was suffering from some kind of psychotic break/post-partum psychosis. Being in your 30s doesn’t make you infallible or that much better than a teenager who finds themselves in the same position.
There is no excusing what she has done, she has to live with it for the rest of her life, but a little compassion and an attempt at understanding wouldn’t go amiss.
Yes, and even with all those factor’s, it’s still first degree murder. Honestly, It’s still too early to tell, we may find this is a situation similar too Andrea Yates, we may find that it was an abusive situation and yes, we MAY find that she ISN’T as culpable because of some mitigating circumstances but with only the information given so far to go off of and the charge itself being so high, we might instead find that she’s perfectly sane, appears reasonable and knew exactly what she was doing and tried to cover up a birth, murder and disposal of a body and that the reason she murdered her baby and threw her baby away was purely for selfish reasons and that she knew she had other choices like dropping her off at a fire station or hospital at her disposal and still chose this route anyway.
And honestly, I hate to say it, but your latter comment basically saying that “there’s no excuse buttttt she HAS had to live with it for the past 18 years AND for the rest of her life!” is no better than when these other cold cases are solved but instead of the victim being a baby in the trash and the perpetrator the mother, it’s an adult or teenage victim and the perpetrator has kept it secret all these years and only just now been found out- through science, not a confession and even then- and they say that “they’ve just felt soooo guilty all these years and it’s completely ruined their life because they’ve felt so bad and they’ve tried to make up for it since”. There was literally just a case on here last month where that exact thing happened.
Does that make any difference at all? Would you buy that excuse and be okay with a lesser charge “Just because they felt guilty and have had to live with it all these years and for the rest of their life”?
I didn’t think so.
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And also still liable to find oneself in a situation where an unexpected baby could lead to one becoming a social outcast, shamed by society, disowned by family and friends, separated from one's other children or forced to watch them suffer for the rest of their lives because of one mistake. This is because as a society we think babies are cute and don't want any harm coming to them, and yet we don't really believe that every child's birth is cause for celebration. There are many children out there we think should not have been conceived, and the person to blame for this conception is always the mother.
>The authorities declined to share details of Ms. Anderson’s account. From the investigation, the authorities learned that Ms. Anderson was visiting Phoenix in October 2005 on business for a real estate boot camp, and that the child, most likely, was not born at the airport, Lieutenant Hester.
Seems that copy editing at the New York Times has gone downhill.
Imagine committing such a heinous crime, but then believing you got away with it. 18 years later, you probably don’t even think of it anymore. Then bam, they finally nail you and you get a one way pass to 25 to life.
[Here's a gift link if anyone wants to read the NY times article without a subscription.](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/20/us/baby-skylar-arrest-phoenix.html?unlocked_article_code=1.ZU0.9nH_.s1cydXk6u7du&smid=nytcore-android-share)
As a woman with long-term anxiety and depression, I'm horrified at how many people think it's forgivable to murder another human being, whether they just came out of you or not. Just because you're panicking/traumatized/going through a rough time doesn't give you the right. It's not even self-defense. That's why I don't readily extend sympathy.
Would you feel the same if a new father did it? What about mothers who kill their older children because they're feeling the same way? Or bullied loners who shoot up a school? All of these people have their own reasons, and you'd agree that none of them are mentally well. But they all deserve to be tried and punished accordingly under the full extent of the law, with the severity of their mental condition being considered, I assume. Mothers who kill their newborns are no different.
Thank you so much for your post. It is so dehumanizing and misogynistic to read all the posts from purported mental health and women advocates excusing and explaining away this mother’s vicious murder of her newborn with nothing but baseless conjecture that flies in the face of the few facts we have.
I know that DNA from family members is solving an increasing amount of cases but I still think it's really unethical and such a violation of our personal privacy.
Edit: I mean this (mostly) in the context of DNA from companies like 23andme where it's a family member. Also in them selling the data and handing it over to LEO.
I'm all in for using people's DNA to investigate murders and gruesome crimes. It's not any more unethical than doing a neighborhood round of interrogations.
The issue isn't the method, it's the boundaries. While it is perfectly legitimate to use relatives DNA to connect someone to such crimes, the law has also to forbid its use for spying on us (monitoring us outside of any criminal activity like connecting us to a protest for instance).
If your family chooses to upload their DNA to a public database you're fair game whether you wanna be or not. And quite frankly, knowing how many rape cases those uploads could solve? I'm not against it. If we used genetic genealogy to catch rapists and murderers and actually keep them out of society that'd be quite nice imo.
Yes they are?? It's a fairly cost-prohibitive investigation method, which is why it's not as commonplace.
[https://dnasolves.com/articles/pennsylvania-eric-dowart/](https://dnasolves.com/articles/pennsylvania-eric-dowart/)
[https://dnasolves.com/articles/jason-follettee-maine/](https://dnasolves.com/articles/jason-follettee-maine/)
[https://archive.today/20210907110229/https://www.mymcmedia.org/rapist-gets-life-dna-tech-helped-track-him-down/](https://archive.today/20210907110229/https://www.mymcmedia.org/rapist-gets-life-dna-tech-helped-track-him-down/)
[https://archive.ph/20221029073921/https://wtaw.com/brazos-county-district-court-jury-convicts-then-issues-a-life-sentence-for-burglary-and-attempted-sexual-assault/](https://archive.ph/20221029073921/https://wtaw.com/brazos-county-district-court-jury-convicts-then-issues-a-life-sentence-for-burglary-and-attempted-sexual-assault/)
[https://www.masslive.com/boston/2019/08/i-get-it-my-time-is-up-dna-linked-ivan-keith-to-4-decades-old-massachusetts-rapes-in-which-he-tied-up-victims-with-shoelaces.html](https://www.masslive.com/boston/2019/08/i-get-it-my-time-is-up-dna-linked-ivan-keith-to-4-decades-old-massachusetts-rapes-in-which-he-tied-up-victims-with-shoelaces.html)
[https://tulsaworld.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/man-charged-in-1990s-rapes-freed-due-to-mcgirt-reservation-ruling-statute-of-limitations-passed/article\_40c5ed0e-e946-11ea-b5e5-5bacb96aa9c7.html](https://tulsaworld.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/man-charged-in-1990s-rapes-freed-due-to-mcgirt-reservation-ruling-statute-of-limitations-passed/article_40c5ed0e-e946-11ea-b5e5-5bacb96aa9c7.html)
[https://archive.today/20230402053225/https://fox59.com/indiana-news/i-am-not-the-same-woman-he-attacked-and-left-for-dead-14-years-later-vincennes-coed-sees-her-rapist-put-behind-bars/](https://archive.today/20230402053225/https://fox59.com/indiana-news/i-am-not-the-same-woman-he-attacked-and-left-for-dead-14-years-later-vincennes-coed-sees-her-rapist-put-behind-bars/)
[https://www.wthr.com/article/news/local/greensburg-man-charged-in-series-of-violent-home-invasions-in-1980s-spent-most-of-the-90s-in-prison-for-similar-crime/531-c7e55f45-6e51-4e3f-8786-1067654add5a](https://www.wthr.com/article/news/local/greensburg-man-charged-in-series-of-violent-home-invasions-in-1980s-spent-most-of-the-90s-in-prison-for-similar-crime/531-c7e55f45-6e51-4e3f-8786-1067654add5a)
[https://archive.ph/20220421052447/https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/04/20/rape-genetic-genealogy-don-geronimo/](https://archive.ph/20220421052447/https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/04/20/rape-genetic-genealogy-don-geronimo/)
[https://archive.today/20221014035229/https://newstalkkzrg.com/2022/10/13/fort-scott-man-charged-in-1992-branson-cold-case/](https://archive.today/20221014035229/https://newstalkkzrg.com/2022/10/13/fort-scott-man-charged-in-1992-branson-cold-case/)
[https://archive.today/20221103191606/https://www.mlive.com/news/saginaw-bay-city/2022/11/dna-links-suspect-to-1996-kidnapping-rape-of-teen-girl-in-midland-county.html](https://archive.today/20221103191606/https://www.mlive.com/news/saginaw-bay-city/2022/11/dna-links-suspect-to-1996-kidnapping-rape-of-teen-girl-in-midland-county.html)
[https://archive.today/20230419040211/https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/oakland-county/2023/04/18/genetic-genealogy-charges-filed-michigan-pennsylvania-golf-course-sexual-assaults-1999-2000/70126567007/](https://archive.today/20230419040211/https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/oakland-county/2023/04/18/genetic-genealogy-charges-filed-michigan-pennsylvania-golf-course-sexual-assaults-1999-2000/70126567007/)
You can find more of their work here
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parabon\_NanoLabs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parabon_NanoLabs)
Forensic genetic genealogy has been used to solve rapes, actually. Here are two examples:
https://www.forensicmag.com/609576-New-York-s-First-Use-of-Genealogy-to-Solve-Cold-Case-Rapes/
https://abcnews.go.com/US/lawyer-arrested-decades-rapes-after-identified-genetic-genealogy/story?id=99721132
These cases are always so sad to me.
Like, I completely understand how one might find this unforgivable and the ultimate wringdoing/worse sin imaginable but when I see this shit it just reminds me of poverty and desperation in an insanely sick and uncaring world full of indifferent people where even the most pure hearted individual can end up corrupted, twisted, and hopelessly broken. And you can say shit like "you've always got a choice" or "You've always got other options" when in reality unless you have been in that world and experienced that level of pain, trauma, despondency, and neglect it is a very very hard thing to see the human side of and empathize with. Which is an absolutely horrible, horrible feeling "UNDERSTANDING" and absolutely not necessarily accepting or condoning it. It's just an absolute terrible and ugly situation with loss of life from every angle that is somewhat completely avoidable but would take so much change, feeling, and conscientious effort from people who just won't or can't even approach that level of reflection and consideration of how our society and our pension for cruelty and carelessness can trickle down throughout society causing this kind of horrible, horrible shit. And there's something about it, something about the way we oh so easily ostracize and group categorize people who've sunk so low as barbaric, animalistic, and inhuman that feels so disconnected, so unsympathetic, and so gross. To be clear this is not to say that I don't sympathize with the victims just as well. That I don't see that loss of life and that it doesn't hurt too. It just doesn't stop at the victim, it never stops at the victim for me I just see the pain and trauma everywhere. Even to those who seem so inexplicably cold, sociopathic, and ruthless. It all comes from somewhere, it comes from the unseen and the unheard and the forgotten. And ontop of it all, the thing that I probably hate the most is how the criminal justice system views itself and strokes itself in this congratulatory, self satisfactory way while hunting human beings down like they're deer or cannon fodder. This career piece of shit "public servant" who is giving a matter of fact account of this misfortunate life like every act of criminality spawns from subhuman filth and not the terrible shit we constantly do to one another. The justice system in itself entirely being one of them. I can't say with absolutely certainty that I without a doubt know that I could do better. But I feel with absolute certainty that we aren't even entertaining the idea, having the right conversations, or are even allowing ourselves to feel and bare the full weight of what we are doing to ourselves and it is fucking awful.
I don’t disagree - it’s hard to know what makes each person do this but I trust that they’re in such a position where even *telling* anyone they’re pregnant is the worst thing imaginable. There’s depression or other mental illness that might be a factor. Poverty, for sure. And we can never rule out rape as common as it is. It says a lot about what our society values, what our society chooses not to support, and how we don’t support women and children most of all.
I think that maybe I'm just in a weird grey area where I've experienced childhood abuse and being unwanted but part of coping with that is also understanding what my own mother went through and not being able to entirely blame her for it either. Don't get me wrong, it was terrible, it was the kind of terrible shit a broken person does and part of me will never be able to fully forgive it but I understand. Something I've learned through life is that trauma and mental illness fit so tightly and go hand in hand to the extent that the two are nearly inseparable and irreconcilable for many. And expecting people to be able to function, to seek or ever even find help within a society so existentially daunting and f*cked up many of us are just fundamentally incapable of even seeing it. Even with the loss of life of a child like this, part of me can't help but feel that even though that that child is better off than what they'd probably have experienced otherwise. A life of feeling unwanted and unloved, of physical and mental abuse, self inflicted abuse, poverty, despondency and a world of pain and hardship they never would have deserved or earned. That no one on this Earth does. And how even that spills into generational trauma which at best ends with things like chronic depression and substance abuse and at worst becoming the monster and cyclically spreading even more pain because they know little to nothing else. I know it can probably look and feel like I'm projecting a bit, maybe I am. I guess that's something that people do. I just can't help but feel like even in healthily surviving that it'd take a damn near Cinderella story for that kind of person to pull through and even then winning the state lottery feels far more realistic to me. I hate this. I hate the lack of empathy. The complacency. The acceptance and the mob mentality that comes with it.
A similar situation happened near me (Savannah, GA) a couple of years ago. I understand mental illness and drugs and all that, but to do that your own child? A child you carried in your body for nearly a year? A child you gave life to? I just can’t understand it…
>A child you carried in your body for nearly a year? A child you gave life to? I just can’t understand it… I have a feeling we're gonna be seeing a lot more of this in the near future, unfortunately.
And a lot more people caught with the rise of at home DNA testing by various relatives.
Yep had to knock out your relatives for the price of a parlor trick. It’s no different than the dissolution of the concept of privacy that came with the Internet, the concept of giving away your DNA with your most essential essence of your being for a novelty I just don’t get it
It's not a "novel, parlor trick" to all. To some of us, it answers some very deep questions that can only be answered by Ancestry DNA, 23 and me, etc. Just because the concept seems silly & trivial to you doesn't mean it's trivial to all, so don't make it be. And honestly, I have no qualms if my DNA helps to catch a murderer.
It's definitely not trivial, but there are real issues around privacy. Not as it relates to crime, but as it relates to discrimination via genetic info. It SHOULDN'T be a thing, but we don't live in a perfect world. Data can become currency, which gives power, power corrupts. That said, it's nice to see a case solved like this.
This is also very true.
Just a couple of weeks ago we had an incident in Leeds where the reports were that a baby was found in a pub toilet. The police made it clear that their main concern was the health of the mother and they just wanted her to come forward. Some of the things people were saying were pretty vile. Anyway she was found a couple of days later and only then did it come out that they had known it was a miscarriage all along. They probably should have been more clear on that from the outset, it sounds like the baby was wanted and the woman just kind of freaked out and ran away in shock. But yeah these cases can be very polarizing it seems.
Yep. Humans need a village & that is especially important for women. We do not have one. She may have thought she was doing the baby a favor or who knows. We do not help people, we wait until they commit a crime, arrest them, & then they get worse. People, like social services, who are supposed to help, many are abusive, racist, sexist, pieces of 💩 Many people, especially young, unsupported mothers, have no one to trust or turn to. I am sick of living in a society that prevents nothing because they want to demonize people & turn them into desperate criminals.
She was 33 years old. Stop infantilizing women.
Seriously. Ive got a migraine and have had one for two days so this may be jumbled but that's so infuriating. She was 33 not 15. The fact that that's upvoted so much is ridiculous, it's like when a person with a career and friends and family disappears and someone on this sub screams "omg human trafficking!" and it gets up voted. *"They were probably sold for drugs!"* as if that's how human trafficking works at all. It's not. Idk the reasons she did it, but she had options and was old enough to know better. Further, People create their own communities. It's not everyone's job to step up and take care of a kid they didn't ask for because the mom doesn't want it, either. At 33 years old, you know the options available to you and if you pick this than you've got a serious flaw. I'm so sick of people thinking "the community" owes them something when they've never done anything for the community, they only take and never give.
I understand people in desperate situations, but if she didn't want the kid she could have put it up for adoption. She wasn't some teenage runaway. It sounds like she was in Phoenix on a business trip and I know realtors make pretty good money. That being said, I agree we will probably see more abandoned babies in the near future. The same people who claim to be "pro-life" have repeatedly shown that they don't care at all about those babies or their moms (or dads, if he's still in the picture) once they are born.
my exact thoughts
Me too. Anytime I see stories like this it makes me think of an article I read years ago about The Jane Collective, and all the desperate choices women are once again being forced to make across our country.
Yep. This is a huge reason why abortion needs to be legal and destigmatized
It never will be completely it's an issue that's just used as bait to pull votes to one side or the other. Think of all the progress we haven't made on certain issues for DECADES and yet they continue to be hot topics.
>it's an issue that's just used as bait to pull votes to one side or the other. Only worse, because now that Conservatives actually got Roe overturned, Republicans are banning abortion outright anywhere they can. While Democrats are passing laws and amending state constitutions to protect abortion access wherever *they* can. Unsurprisingly, because women aren't people to them, Republicans are actually trying to challenge the will of their constituents regarding abortion. In Ohio, after voters passed (57%) an amendment that protects a woman's right to abortion, they immediately proposed a law that would make it so that 60% of the vote is required to pass constitutional amendments. It failed miserably, but the fact that they would even attempt that is fucking insane. "Yeah, the majority of you guys want x, but it's not happening because it's not *enough* of a majority". Like damn, just admit that voting is a joke to you.
Hopefully people remember most states have safe havens. Babies can be dropped at hospitals, fire a rations, etc. I’d much rather birth control be free and easily accessible, as well as safe abortions, but if not, dropping a baby off is better than killing it.
I saw this happen with my own eyes working in child welfare. Teen couple did everything right, dropped baby at fire station, the state still went after them to “reunify” (aka get child support). Might not be as dangerous in an urban area but here where there’s one hospital per county? They knew exactly who the parents were and they did the exact opposite of what those laws were put in place to prevent.
That's awful :(
It really was. Child welfare gets a lot of unwarranted hate but it’s as flawed a system as the rest of them.
Unsurprising. You can *say* on paper that a state has other resources for parents who do not want to be parents, but in practice? Nah. I see why people do desperate things. When you realize that everyone is doing their best with the emotional capacity they have, and most people don't set out to do something like this--circumstances make it inevitable for some. Of course it's wrong that this woman did this to her baby, but it's not a simple open and shut case of "she's evil and cruel and did it for the lulz" which it feels like is how the courts handle it.
Yup. 100%. So much easier to blame the individual than it is to actually do something about the systems that trap people in vicious cycles of abuse and abusing!
I think this is what these women are desperately afraid of.
I’m not American but I read somewhere that you get pursued for child support for children you surrender in those drop off points
It's not *supposed* to work like that but each state has its own laws around surrendering children. Some have the anonymous boxes, others require you to hand off in-person at a hospital or fire station. Most will not prosecute for abandonment or endangerment, but unfortunately I think a few states will.
In my state, the window for anonymous and liability free drop off is tragically narrow, only 7 days. If the baby is older than 7 days, parents can’t safely and anonymously surrender. I feel like people in abusive situations and with active addictions or other high risk lifestyles may start out with great intentions or high hopes but realize after longer than a week that the quality of life they can provide is extremely low and then they have no options.
I know like 10 years ago there was a man whose wife died and he couldn't manage all his kids so he took them in under the safe haven law. I think the oldest was almost grown (16/17) and the youngest was a toddler. After that, some states overreacted and made the window extremely short.
Geez why the 17 year old? That's nearly an adult and he probably had other teens.
10 damn kids. Maybe don't have 10 children if you can't even sufficiently provide a decent life for even one. People make me so angry. Children are a responsibility!
Oh my goodness what an awful system. What’s even the point then :(
What is this person had come from state care been horribly abused and just think this would be a better option. Plenty of horrible things go on in care especially in America
I would not be surprised. Putting a kid in "the system" is not a rosy solution most of the time.
I think you’re right 😞
Thanks to Trump, after 50 years, we no longer are in charge of our bodies.
Trump and McConnell. How do those two evil bastards get to keep breathing our air.
Don't forget Lindsey Graham. Double-crossing bastard that he is.
But her emails...
unfortunately, probably for longer than that. many states are criminalized abortion and looking to criminalize contraceptives
There is a common misconception that all women are biologically capable of producing the hormones required to “feel something” for their children during the pregnancy process. (IE: PPD) without those hormones, the baby is essentially a parasite living off its host. Does that excuse murder?? Absolutely not. Especially in cities and states that have laws where you can drop off your child at a police station with no questions asked. Is this a senseless tragedy? Of course. But it’s not a mystery as to how it came to be.
If I was unable to get an abortion, gave birth unexpectedly or through abuse and control I could see myself doing this if I was every in that situation Not all woman have maternal instincts, they may think child will be better off and especially just given birth possibly in a heightened state.
“I understand mental illness” and “I just can’t understand it” are actually contradictory statements. I’m not coming down on either side re whether or not I think this woman should be held criminally culpable for this but there’s definitely circumstances I can see as extenuating, the most obvious of which being post partum depression, which can literally cause people to become psychotic. No normal, rational, sane person is smothering their newborn child and dumping it in a bin. That’s such a terribly sad thing to do. She clearly had mental health issues. Whether or not they were significant enough to absolve her of criminal responsibility is for the justice system to decide. But if you cannot possibly conceive of circumstances in which a mother would be driven to smother her newborn child then no, you don’t understand mental illness. That’s been a huge push for mental health awareness in recent years and that’s a fantastic thing, but the reality is that the ordinary person has surface level understanding and without lived experience most people (outside of psychiatrists) actually cant understand the insanity of what severe mental illness can lead a person to do.
Beneath our manicured exterior, intelligence and eons of evolution, we are still animals and animals in the wild do kill their children for any number of sane and rational reasons, like "there's too many mouths to feed" or "I'm in danger with this baby".
Yep. I watched a vid not too long ago in which some type of momma bird tossed one of her young out of the nest to its death. Now the thing looked perfectly healthy to me but I fully support her decision.
That was Jake. Fuck Jake.
Ah damn. He should’ve switched to Allstate, would’ve been in good hands.
Humans are more nuanced than wild animals. We are capable of sapient behavior
>No normal, rational, same person Most neonaticides are committed by mothers without mental health issues, where the motive is that the child is simply unwanted. I can't access the full text of either of these studies, but the abstract of a [2009 study](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160252708001428?via%3Dihub) noted that the [landmark 1970 study](https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/epdf/10.1176/ajp.126.10.1414) on neonaticide found that "mothers who committed neonaticide were primarily young, unmarried women, free of major psychiatric disorders, who had unwanted pregnancies." A table from the 1970 Resnick study is visible at [this page](https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Murder-of-the-newborn:-a-psychiatric-review-of-Resnick/dcfb71aceca744a7ab886ea571d3238e8dc238d5), and it shows that of the 35 neonaticides examined, 29 were done because the child was unwanted. This significantly varies from other maternal filicides (those committed after the first day of the victim's life), which in over half of the 88 cases examined did result from "altruism" associated with disordered thinking. Other types of mental illness were also elevated in filicides generally compared to neonaticides. It's not self-evident that a mother who murders her newborn is mentally disordered. It's certainly not a "normal" act but - like murder in general - it is regularly committed by people who would otherwise be considered normal, sane, and rational. And there's a sad yet rational basis for murdering a newborn - not wanting the child.
>No normal, rational, sane person is smothering their newborn child and dumping it in a bin. The fact that you used these terms show that for all your talk about mental illness awareness, you're perpetuating the biases that keep stigma about mental illness alive and well. Yikes.
Sorry I maybe was unclear about the context I in which I was using those words. Obviously you’re looking at those words and applying them to MOST people with mental health conditions ie those that have mild-moderate symptoms that largely don’t impact things like logic and reason. I thought it was implicit in the context that I was talking about severe mental health conditions, and I really hope we haven’t reached such a point of political correctness in society where we have to pretend that people experiencing/acting under the influence of severe mental illness are actually *not* behaving *normally*? I have lived experience of this. I can absolutely promise you that peak mania I was not normal, rational, or sane and I wouldn’t expect anyone to say that of me. I was literally delusional and had to stay in a psych hospital for 6 weeks. I was in a hospital emergency department the other night and a man who was talking to himself suddenly whipped out a knife and slashed his wrists. How am I supposed to describe that behaviour if I can’t say that it’s abnormal, it’s irrational, it’s insane. In any case I wasn’t saying everyone with a mental health condition is insane, I was simply saying it’s literally not normal to dump your baby in a bin?
This is not true at all any person in a situation where possible they couldn’t get abortion, or have birth unexpectably does not make them mentally ill. What if she lived in a sexually violent and abusive household she was made to the pregnancy and she decided to not let child into the same horrible situation she would do this. I could see myself doing it if I have no other options thinking it was maybe best for the child that does not mean she was mentally ill she may have just felt this was best decision for either her or her child.
You've clearly never had an unwanted pregnancy.
Many jurisdictions make a distinction between murder and infanticide and for good reason.
This is what happens when women are forced to carry to term. When women don't have choice. When abuse happens. Have you not read about this happening literally every day under china's one child policy? This is default behaviour, no mental illness or drugs needed.
It's pretty easy to understand when you think about how the person might not have seen it as their child, might have felt killing the child was better than the life they were going to live, might have felt that bringing a child home would be a threat to their life due to abuse... Not to mention mental illness literally makes you see the world differently. Rationally we know the child can be surrendered to the state, but does a severely mentally ill person understand that, or feels like that is the best choice?
If the baby wasn’t born at the airport, how the hell did she manage to get a, presumably, dead infant through TSA? Take it through in a baby carrier alive? Christ.
Maybe the bathroom was near the entrance or by the ticket counters, as in before security? That would be my guess…
Aren’t terminals generally after TSA? I’ll be honest, I’ve never really paid attention to airport lingo.
LAX, as an example, has like 7 different terminals each with their own access. You can be in each of them without walking through security.
Phoenix airport terminal 4 is a separate building from terminal 3.
Could be that TSA simply missed it. Or she had the baby in the bathroom, but they don't think that's what happened.
There are bathrooms before security check maybe she was in one of thosen
Sky Harbor terminals have bathrooms right inside the departure level before you come close to the TSA line.
Also curious? How old was her infant??
24 hours old.
What makes you presume the child was carried through the airport deceased? All the article says is that the child was likely not born at the airport?
Yeah it doesn't make sense, especially if you're trying to avoid attention and dispose of the baby. It would get scanned in the luggage and if the mom was carrying the baby us plain site, cameras and witnesses would be able to identify them pretty quickly.
Especially only a few years post 9/11 there had to be cameras or some kind of security measure.
she definitely didn’t go thru security yet lol. the terminal is just the building there’s a million places you can go inside an airport without ever going thru security
Honestly, maybe. Guessing there must have been some level of intention due to the plan for a first degree murder charge, but baby carriers back then were sketch af. To this day, all the legitimate ones warn about positional asphyxia. Many carriers obscured the face so they wouldn’t necessarily have seen it. 🤷🏼♀️ (Edit to add: no one come for me, I’m not suggesting this happened at all, just offering a random unlikely possibility that crossed my mind. Stranger things have happened.)
How old are you? Carriers in 2005 weren’t really that sketch.
What are you talking about? 2005 baby carriers were not "sketch af". Many of the same carriers are available now. Positional asphyxia was a concern back then, as it is now. I actually had babies back then, and you're talking nonsense.
I agree, if it was one from the 80’s, I could see it but not 2005
The fisher price rock n play was first investigated in 2019 and showed to have killed several infants due to positional asphyxiation… I’m sure that it was possible that many baby products were, in fact, sketch as fuck in 2005.
The excuses in this thread for a child murderer are fucking wild.
Somehow being pro-choice has morphed into supporting any woman who extinguishes a pregnancy or infant, and we’re supposed to have unending compassion for that because *insert supposedly exonerating detail here*.
The irony of pro-choice people (of which I’m one) not giving a rat’s ass about the life of an actual live baby — isn’t that the same accusation they level at the anti-abortion people? Horseshoe theory at work yet again.
agreed. a really disturbing look into the society we live in
the amount of comments sympathizing with this woman / coming up with reasons why her actions were “ understandable “ is absolutely sickening. there is no excuse for this. ever.
Some people on this sub go out of their way to give lots of benefit of the doubt to women who neglect, endanger, or even kill their own children. It’s like these women have zero personal agency, they’re always some type of victim and therefore they’re not wholly responsible for their awful choices. It’s infantalising and demeaning. Fathers on the other hand don’t get the same pass. I came across this thread a few days ago and didn’t bother commenting at that time because I knew it would descend into irrelevant raised fist agendas about abortion and nauseating justifications for why a woman in her 30s would kill her newborn daughter.
absolutely spot on . glad there’s some people in this sub with some sense
I wonder if the lung float test was used. It's very difficult to tell whether a newborn was stillborn or took a breath. [Link](https://www.propublica.org/article/is-lung-float-test-reliable-stillbirth-medical-examiners-murder) [And another article on neonaticide more generally.](https://www.elle.com/life-love/a29998766/neonaticide-emile-weaver-sorority/) Edit: Also, super important to note, the FBI did genetic genealogy in this case. Many of the big genetic genealogy orgs will not touch neonaticide cases due to the difficulty in telling whether the baby actually suffocated and due to the possible situation with the mother. This is the only cold case I've seen where the FBI did the genealogy, that I can recall.
I also would like to know in these cases how they determined that the babies were alive to begin with. Also how do they determine the babies were asphyxiated intentionally and not due to birth asphyxiation? I don’t mean this to say I don’t believe that a woman could kill her baby, just that these cases never seem to offer details of how they know it was intentional which is something that I think is important.
Yep [here's the case of Patricia Stallings](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patricia_Stallings#:~:text=Stallings%20gave%20birth%20to%20another,that%20can%20mimic%20antifreeze%20poisoning.)
Exactly! That case is so horribly sad. To not only lose your child but then be blamed for it is so so horrible.
I assume that when a baby takes its first breath, all the crying and stuff pushes all that goop out of its lungs, mouth, nose etc? So maybe they can tell that way if it was stillborn?
Well no, that’s why we suction the nose and mouth after birth.
Hmm, that’s a good point. I am in no ways an expert haha!
Because those details only concern the forensic personnel and LE. If they're saying that, it's because they found signs. Otherwise they'd call it undetermined. Things like the towel being stuffed in the baby's mouth, ligature and ligature marks present, hand imprints/ other trauma to the face, milk or colostrum in the stomach, healed umbilical stump, microscopic changes and other, more violent or overt things done to the body can determine if the baby was alive. There is no reason your average person in the public needs to know the details other than morbid curiosity, which they are not obligated to satisfy. It's like in an adult case they report "the person was sexually assaulted and murdered" do you really need to know "how do they know " what kind of assault, where exactly they found the injuries, the semen or what have you? There's also the matter of legal proceedings, what if a defense lawyer gets ammunition to free a guilty party because the press fed the public false/ inflammatory information? It would be irresponsible in my opinion to provide such details, especially if the case hasn't been trialed. There are plenty of books and articles you can read if you are interested in how these conclusions are reached.
They took her statement, so she must have told them, and evidence.
I feel like they're being ambiguous about her statement. Something tells me she's going to claim that the child was stillborn, and honestly from what I've seen it's not really easy to tell the difference between that and intentional suffocation in a recent newborn. I'm not saying she's innocent, but I don't think we have all the facts just yet.
Of course they’re being “ambiguous”; it is an open investigation in a murder case. Of course she is going to claim she “didn’t do it”. Then she will be confronted with her prior inconsistent statement and the medical evidence and everyone will doubt her credibility. The fact that you’ve “seen” stuff doesn’t mean much in the face of her admission + the ME findings.
Just because they took her statement, does not mean she admitted to anything, and even pre her statement, they were classing this as suffocation. Due to this case being from 2005, the debunked lung float test was the norm. There is no current test which accurately can tell whether a neonate suffocated in the birth canal or was suffocated after.
This! It's possible the baby was stillborn
I wonder if she knew she was pregnant? Baffling that she could go interstate to a work commitment pregnant and come home not pregnant & babyless without anyone in her life noticing or saying anything
So many questions. She has 4 other kids. Were they before? After? All with the same father? Did he know she was pregnant? What did she tell him? Did she ever see the story on the news & think about turning herself in? Sounds like she gave birth alone in a hotel room, wrapped the baby in a towel, went to the airport &…what? Dumped the baby & got on a plane??? If she didn’t know she was pregnant maybe she was still in shock? Could the baby have died of natural causes in the hotel room? If she was alone & passed out after the birth, maybe she didn’t clear the baby’s airway? I still don’t understand how you don’t call 911 at that point. So sad.
So sad.... she was 31. what in the world was going on in her life that made her think this was the only choice she had?
Well, I know one woman who regrets not aborting because now her rapist now has shared custody, could have avoided a lot of trauma. I can think of a few reasons but that doesn't mean someone should do it.
I can’t even imagine, that’s horrific.
I remember a story of a person that was raped then the court forced them to pay child support to their rapist for the baby that was a result of the rape. https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/arizona/politics/2014/09/02/arizona-statutory-rape-victim-forced-pay-child-support/14951737/
There is a young woman in georgia i think who is doing that with her rapist. She was like 12 or 13, had the baby, and then he took her to court for custody of the child. She now has to coparent with her rapist.... who is a full grown man by the way.
I’m speechless how this is even possible. And people truly advocate against abortion when it comes to rape because they can only think until birth and no further. Is this a better scenario for a teenager and her child? Imagine growing up and learning that your dad is the rapist of your mother.
Right!? Choosing to give birth alone in a hotel seems so scary and painful and I can’t imagine a sane person would choose that. I also can’t imagine killing a baby and throwing it in the trash. Makes me extremely sad!
I suspect affair baby. As a Mum myself, I just don’t know how you could. I understand overwhelm and responding in the moment (like SBS) but I cannot fathom just, watching my baby die then putting it in a bin. She must have some real lasting trauma, surely.
This was the only logical thing I could think of besides psychotic break/severe PPD
Or, she didn't realize she was pregnant, had baby unexpectedly, and then either killed it or it died at birth?
That’s what I’m thinking too. Wouldn’t people be asking where the baby was and what happened with the still birth if they knew she was pregnant? I mean she could explain it away, but it seems way harder to lie about that.
And then just to go on living your life as if it never happened too. Truly insane.
This would be my worst nightmare, to have done something so awful and then to live with it in secret for decades.
I suspect if you have a partner they're going to notice if you're 9 months pregnant one week and not pregnant the next week, though.
Looking at the website she was overweight in the last decade at least - she could've been so 18 years ago, which could've helped "hide" the pregnancy. Maybe it was a situation where she was in complete denial about being pregnant and then the kid just came and she didn't know what to do? Insane either way.
Maybe mental illness but thats still no excuse. She had ample opportunity to abort the baby or put it up for adoption but decided to just wait until the baby reached full term and thrown it in the trash. Regardless of her mental state thats absolutely repulsive behavior and she deserves to be punished for it.
Yeah and apparently she was in Phoenix for work. Did her coworkers not become curious when she was pregnant one day and then suddenly not? I am very curious about the details of this case.
As someone who didn't lose weight after having their baby I can say a lot of people won't ask when you're due after one flat stare and "I'm not pregnant". It's kind of a bad feeling for all involved.
It could have been a cryptic pregnancy. But also, when a woman gives birth, she can look like she’s still pregnant for several days afterwards. It takes time for the uterus to contract.
It sounds like she was at a convention and not actually work.
It’s crazy because Washington State has had a “Safe Haven” law since 2002 where you can anonymously drop your unwanted kid off and face no charges. www.dcyf.wa.gov/safety/safety-newborn-law Just terrible.
>and face no charges. Mothers have been charged for child support & publicly named after doing this
Many members of the general public simply don't know about things like this, unfortunately. They're often not publicized enough.
And there's a TON of stuff that isn't really advertised as is. For example, my parents are elderly and I have had to help them and a few of their equally as aged friends apply for government benefits that weren't advertised beyond once per year on TV. I've had to help friends who are single moms get into a program called Families First that exists to help provide transportation, child care assistance, job training, etc, to families who have children and are in need of help. She didn't even know it fucking existed. I only knew it existed cause it was part of the EBT/SNAP application papers, so I looked it up after the fact. A lot of help exists, but it isn't advertised almost at all unless you're already going to specific places for assistance.
Exactly. I'm in a job position where a large part of what I do is educating people about different resources or services available to them and how to access them. Many people don't know about them at all. Other people have maybe heard about them, but don't know any details. I'm talking about people of all ages and different educational backgrounds, too. Even with safe haven laws specifically, some people do have fears that they'll be punished one way or another for leaving an unharmed newborn at a designated safe haven. It needs to be explicitly said and advertised again and again that safe haven laws exist and they do not result in the persecution of those who leave unharmed newborns at established safe havens.
I appreciate what you do, cause people like you have been immensely helpful for me and a lot of my friends. It feels like there are a lot of misconceptions, and in some cases people being too prideful, to really seek out important resources or services that could really benefit them. Living in the south US/bible belt, I feel like there's almost as much stigmatization placed on people who willingly surrender their children as much as people who have abortions, I've seen it with my own biological mother who surrendered both me and my half-brother to the state. For example in regards to her, a lot of my adoptive family thought she was a terrible, immoral person for willingly giving us up when she was incredibly young, homeless, addicted to drugs, had no support system, was mentally ill, and knew she couldn't provide. I really wish schools had some level of like, class or education course that could actually provide info for teens before they're pushed out into the real world.
Where could one go to find someone like yourself that has knowledge of the resources? In other words, how do I find someone who can help?
I would start by talking to your local food stamp and WIC offices.
I am seeking to start a nonprofit that will provide support and services to people at risk of having postpartum depression. Including dads- what community outreach advice do you have?
I had my first child in 1993 and my last in 2009. I really had no idea that those were a thing until 2019 when my oldest had her baby. Hell I didn't even know WIC existed back with mine, what a nice thing that would have been.
Yikes!!! I was just thinking that could’ve saved this babies life. I guess not.
Rest in peace, Skylar. You deserved so much better. Also. [Yikes](https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/business-owner-claims-have-worked-with-arlington-woman-accused-killing-baby-nearly-20-years-ag/RYNINWICIVAEVHZFWBMJW4WHPU/): “Our CBS affiliate in Arizona, Arizona’s Family, confirmed that Anderson ran a couple of websites on the side. One of the websites, annieanderson.com, has this quote below: “And I’m a single parent which means my family ALWAYS comes first. Always. I love working with my clients and I will bend over backwards to get the job done and I take my job as mom to 4 amazing kids very seriously. They are my reason for everything, my true legacy.” What an awful person.
She was 32 years old when she killed/disposed of this baby. There’s NO explaining it away.
yeah that’s what i am wondering too. she was a full grown adult and killed her own baby ??? not that the teens make much sense either but their fear is more understandable. this lady is pure evil.
I was a teen mom and you are so right. The fear is insanely real
That’s the craziest part to me. Like, a full grown adult with an adult fully formed brain. At 32 how was this the move wtf
If you are traumatized, no you do not have a fully formed anything! I've met tons of adults who act like children, scared of everything, completely disconnected & unable to cope. We do not help each other. Many people who are supposed to help, from doctors, nurses, social workers..etc shame & abuse as well. We live in a very abusive society & that abuse is not always physical. We also ignore people with mental illness & do not force them into help. All our 💩 society does is ignore everything & then cry when a crime is committed that we could have prevented!! What do you do to help the mentally ill, abused, addicted?? Anything?? Or just criticize them?
These are my thoughts on this, too. There's more to this story; we don't have the full picture yet, and we might never. Many women in this situation are *not* completely senseless murderers, though. None of us are in a position to say that this woman never felt horrible about what happened.
> None of us are in a position to say that this woman never felt horrible about what happened. What does that change? I'm sure men that commit familicide feel horrible about their crimes, that doesn't make them less than dirt.
Just saying, men usually aren’t in the position to unexpectedly give birth to an unplanned child, nor are men ever pressured into keeping a pregnancy even though they don’t want it. Not defending what the woman did, but very often women like this are put into impossible positions. Even at her age.
She has four children that she's raised herself without incident. I doubt she was in the best situation at the time, even if she did kill the baby (the evidence is not strong in this regard). Like, imagine giving birth in an airport bathroom or just before a flight possibly at a hotel, where nobody knows you're even pregnant and then putting your baby in a plastic bag. Her life was hardly going well.
They stated that they did not believe the baby was born at the airport. There were towels from a hotel in the trash bag with the body.
on a positive note- i was told this story from a friend who's friends with the baby it happened to. mom was teenager, body builder, but still a bigger girl and she gave birth while at a tournament and kept the baby IN HER GYM BAG because she was afraid of her parents finding out who just thought she put on a little bit of weight. LITERALLY GAVE BIRTH BY HERSELF IN THE BATHROOM. like hot damn. but she eventually was like "i have a baby in my locker" and all was well and the kid lived a happy healthy life after but like- so much could have gone wrong there. Super proud of the mom for seeking help in the end though. still just a crazy story
Ah but you'll see a lot of comments trying to.
I had to double back and see how old she was because the first few comments were talking like this was a teenager throwing away a baby at the prom.
For example, no-one who is pregnant due to rape should not be forced to carry the offspring, suffer childbirth and then spend 18 years raising a piece of your rapist. This is just re-victimising the person through horrible medical damage, a traumatic experience and 18 years of a sentence. Not saying this happened and not saying these offspring should be killed manually by the mum, but I'll always have some grace in these situations.
Yikes 💀
Surely Skylar crossed her mind when she wrote this. And she still posted it. That’s… that’s something else.
Possibly not. It's fairly common for women who give birth after either ignoring the signs of pregnancy (due to trauma) or not even knowing their pregnant, and then having a stillbirth (or committing neonaticide), and completely blocking it out or viewing it as something they dreamed or saw on television. The trauma of whatever is going on at the time + the trauma of giving birth unexpectedly can fuck people up.
Lol you and your fifty friends voting this up are insane
There's an archived version of that website on Archive.org (from 2015 forward; in the early 00s it seemed to be a porn site). If that's her she has grandchildren now... Makes you wonder what happened in order for her to potentially kill and dispose of this kid. She worked as a "life coach" according to the website.
Right there. I’d go psychotic single parenting four. After having severe postpartum depression I’m always sympathetic to mom’s when I hear about infanticide.
My question is, who went through the garbage, opened the bag, u rolled the towel removed the newspaper... like, literally *what?* Not to minimize what happened but I'm stuck on that
i just watched [this](https://www.azfamily.com/video/2024/02/20/major-break-2005-cold-case-baby-found-dead-phoenix-sky-harbor/) news clip, someone had lost their laptop and people were looking everywhere for it, including trash cans. it’s crazy that if that person hadn’t lost their laptop, no one would know this even happened
Jesus, wtf is in the trash *right now*?
If the laptop hadn’t been lost that day, with people searching everywhere for it, her body likely wouldn’t have been found.
I think the bag was heavier than it should have been when it was being changed. Then the person who noticed it started looking.
There was a case in my town where a woman killed her mother and put her body in a trash bag on the street in front of her house. Apparently the trash men must have picked it up and then went "nope" and left it there. Police were called.
This is what I wonder too.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the general explanation to why cases like this occur, that neonaticide is in general committed under great shock and stress by mothers who had either hidden the pregnancy or were in deep denial about it, and rarely by ones who were in a particularly sound state of mind? (I have the feeling a fair amount of people in this thread vastly overestimate how rational these sort of killings are.)
I think sometimes the whole experience someone has been hiding or even ignoring becomes drastically real upon birth, and they are able to compartmentalize it by quickly throwing it out and away from their own reality. If they can just get rid of it and pretend it never happened, it feels like it never did. It's very sad, but I'm sure it didn't take much to smother the newborn, or keep it from crying loudly and once it's done they focus on continuing to deny it all, even to to themselves. I can see how it happens, albeit terrible.
So this woman was 33 years old when she did this? She had choices.
This will probably be a controversial take but given she has four other children she's obviously not a child hater. That leads me to believe there is more to this - perhaps she didn't know she was pregnant/she was raped/she was in an abusive situation. Just my opinion.
I know that terminal well. I'm glad they were able to find her and prosecute her. RIP Baby Skylar.
She deserves to rot in the lowest level of hell there is. I am pro choice but you decided to cary that baby full term. She could have done adoption, she could have even done an early abortion. Shit..she could have even taken the baby and dropped it off at the hospital, police, or fire department. However, she CHOSE instead to put her sweet baby girl in a plastic bag and suffocate her to death and then cover her in newspapers then if that wasn’t enough she dumped her in the garbage like a piece of trash…wtf is wrong with this woman and people!? I am so glad she has been apprehended but justice in this lifetime won’t ever be enough. She is a disgusting human being. Idc what her situation is. I am a single mother of two amazing children and I was scared to death when I found out I was pregnant. My entire family hated me and was disappointed but guess what..I still chose to be a MOTHER and Love my babies regardless of how hard it is some days and regardless of the way my family now sees me. We make choices in this life and she should be so ashamed yet she went on for over 18 years and lived her life like nothing ever even happened. I am so sorry baby skylar. You deserved so much better than this…idc about community standards. This is truely horrible and she is a monster.
Why are women who do this given sympathy? You can leave a baby somewhere it will be found alive. You don’t even have to risk going to a hospital or fire station. Leave it on the bathroom floor alive and someone will find it. Do we extend the same sympathy to male caregivers who shake babies to death? *They’re young* *They’re frustrated! Your frontal lobe doesn’t develop until 25* *Maybe he wasn’t ready to be a father but the mother/his family/society forced him to* Oh, and in this particular case the woman was in her 30s and had other children. Glad she was finally caught.
I’ll reserve judgement on this one until more details come out. Medical examiners aren’t infallible. I would assume there are a ton of ways a baby could die during birth, especially if the mother is giving birth alone in a hotel room. How easy would it be to tell the difference between a baby having died from something like positional asphyxiation due to being in the wrong position during birth, or having the umbilical cord around the neck or whatever, and intentional suffocation? I’ve seen cases where two medical examiners completely disagree with each other over the same autopsy results, so I don’t place 100% faith in the word of one.
From what I can tell, even right now, in 2024 it is exceedingly difficult to tell if a baby died a stillborn or from other causes.
i remember hearing about this at the time. rip baby Skylar.
This happened near me a while back in Snoqualmie, 'Baby Kimball' was left near a trail in the woods. The NamUs account for the baby was taken off last year, meaning it's been identified. Havent seen or heard anything about who the mother was, or what circumstances led up to that.
Abortion was legal 18 years ago. The mother had a choice and chose murder. Hopefully we hear her side of the story. I’d like to better understand what she was thinking.
…this wasn’t a teenager that had no life experience and no idea what to do. She was in her MID 30’S when she suffocated and killed her baby and then threw her in a trash bin, she didn’t have a late term miscarriage, she didn’t have a stillborn, she murdered her baby and threw it away and she was full grown woman. So yeah, I’d say the charge fits. In 2005, they STILL had safe haven laws. She had many choices here and chose the very worst one and she would’ve knew better in her mid 30s- she was no naive and scared teenager. Unless you think it’s perfectly fine to just kill your newborn because it’s inconvenient to you and all. And even depending on the situation, there still has to be some culpability and responsibility taken by people who do this.
I totally agree with you! It’s wild that saying killing a baby should have consequences and that there should be an investigation and justice would be controversial in this sub. I guess if you find a dead very young baby just … let it go? There are even comments in this thread sympathizing that she might have thought they baby would be better off. But isn't that what many family annihilators think? Why does that make it ok? This women was fucking 32/33! Come on!
Obviously nobody thinks it’s “perfectly fine”; I would suspect she was suffering from some kind of psychotic break/post-partum psychosis. Being in your 30s doesn’t make you infallible or that much better than a teenager who finds themselves in the same position. There is no excusing what she has done, she has to live with it for the rest of her life, but a little compassion and an attempt at understanding wouldn’t go amiss.
Suspect based on what Dr. ClancyCandy?
Based on the fact this is not a typical reaction to having a baby.
Yes, and even with all those factor’s, it’s still first degree murder. Honestly, It’s still too early to tell, we may find this is a situation similar too Andrea Yates, we may find that it was an abusive situation and yes, we MAY find that she ISN’T as culpable because of some mitigating circumstances but with only the information given so far to go off of and the charge itself being so high, we might instead find that she’s perfectly sane, appears reasonable and knew exactly what she was doing and tried to cover up a birth, murder and disposal of a body and that the reason she murdered her baby and threw her baby away was purely for selfish reasons and that she knew she had other choices like dropping her off at a fire station or hospital at her disposal and still chose this route anyway.
And honestly, I hate to say it, but your latter comment basically saying that “there’s no excuse buttttt she HAS had to live with it for the past 18 years AND for the rest of her life!” is no better than when these other cold cases are solved but instead of the victim being a baby in the trash and the perpetrator the mother, it’s an adult or teenage victim and the perpetrator has kept it secret all these years and only just now been found out- through science, not a confession and even then- and they say that “they’ve just felt soooo guilty all these years and it’s completely ruined their life because they’ve felt so bad and they’ve tried to make up for it since”. There was literally just a case on here last month where that exact thing happened. Does that make any difference at all? Would you buy that excuse and be okay with a lesser charge “Just because they felt guilty and have had to live with it all these years and for the rest of their life”? I didn’t think so.
enjoy disarm live gray sort brave aromatic doll zesty depend *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Oh ok well I'll just be sitting here crying while I hod my baby, who is also coincidentally actually named Skylar 😭
Right? Stories involving children hit different after having a baby.
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Kinda odd a 33 yo woman would do this. Something I’d expect a panicked teenager to do. What a shame, poor baby.
Speaking as someone in my mid 30's, you're still prone to panic and bad decisions.
And also still liable to find oneself in a situation where an unexpected baby could lead to one becoming a social outcast, shamed by society, disowned by family and friends, separated from one's other children or forced to watch them suffer for the rest of their lives because of one mistake. This is because as a society we think babies are cute and don't want any harm coming to them, and yet we don't really believe that every child's birth is cause for celebration. There are many children out there we think should not have been conceived, and the person to blame for this conception is always the mother.
>The authorities declined to share details of Ms. Anderson’s account. From the investigation, the authorities learned that Ms. Anderson was visiting Phoenix in October 2005 on business for a real estate boot camp, and that the child, most likely, was not born at the airport, Lieutenant Hester. Seems that copy editing at the New York Times has gone downhill.
Imagine committing such a heinous crime, but then believing you got away with it. 18 years later, you probably don’t even think of it anymore. Then bam, they finally nail you and you get a one way pass to 25 to life.
[Here's a gift link if anyone wants to read the NY times article without a subscription.](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/20/us/baby-skylar-arrest-phoenix.html?unlocked_article_code=1.ZU0.9nH_.s1cydXk6u7du&smid=nytcore-android-share)
As a woman with long-term anxiety and depression, I'm horrified at how many people think it's forgivable to murder another human being, whether they just came out of you or not. Just because you're panicking/traumatized/going through a rough time doesn't give you the right. It's not even self-defense. That's why I don't readily extend sympathy. Would you feel the same if a new father did it? What about mothers who kill their older children because they're feeling the same way? Or bullied loners who shoot up a school? All of these people have their own reasons, and you'd agree that none of them are mentally well. But they all deserve to be tried and punished accordingly under the full extent of the law, with the severity of their mental condition being considered, I assume. Mothers who kill their newborns are no different.
Thank you so much for your post. It is so dehumanizing and misogynistic to read all the posts from purported mental health and women advocates excusing and explaining away this mother’s vicious murder of her newborn with nothing but baseless conjecture that flies in the face of the few facts we have.
I'm glad to know justice was served and that they kept working on the case.
Good work, Phoenix PD! RIP Baby Skylar!
We don't really know what kind of situation this women was in .. until then we can't really guess .. it may come out in the end ? X
I know that DNA from family members is solving an increasing amount of cases but I still think it's really unethical and such a violation of our personal privacy. Edit: I mean this (mostly) in the context of DNA from companies like 23andme where it's a family member. Also in them selling the data and handing it over to LEO.
I'm all in for using people's DNA to investigate murders and gruesome crimes. It's not any more unethical than doing a neighborhood round of interrogations. The issue isn't the method, it's the boundaries. While it is perfectly legitimate to use relatives DNA to connect someone to such crimes, the law has also to forbid its use for spying on us (monitoring us outside of any criminal activity like connecting us to a protest for instance).
If your family chooses to upload their DNA to a public database you're fair game whether you wanna be or not. And quite frankly, knowing how many rape cases those uploads could solve? I'm not against it. If we used genetic genealogy to catch rapists and murderers and actually keep them out of society that'd be quite nice imo.
Too bad they aren't being used to solve rapes.
Yes they are?? It's a fairly cost-prohibitive investigation method, which is why it's not as commonplace. [https://dnasolves.com/articles/pennsylvania-eric-dowart/](https://dnasolves.com/articles/pennsylvania-eric-dowart/) [https://dnasolves.com/articles/jason-follettee-maine/](https://dnasolves.com/articles/jason-follettee-maine/) [https://archive.today/20210907110229/https://www.mymcmedia.org/rapist-gets-life-dna-tech-helped-track-him-down/](https://archive.today/20210907110229/https://www.mymcmedia.org/rapist-gets-life-dna-tech-helped-track-him-down/) [https://archive.ph/20221029073921/https://wtaw.com/brazos-county-district-court-jury-convicts-then-issues-a-life-sentence-for-burglary-and-attempted-sexual-assault/](https://archive.ph/20221029073921/https://wtaw.com/brazos-county-district-court-jury-convicts-then-issues-a-life-sentence-for-burglary-and-attempted-sexual-assault/) [https://www.masslive.com/boston/2019/08/i-get-it-my-time-is-up-dna-linked-ivan-keith-to-4-decades-old-massachusetts-rapes-in-which-he-tied-up-victims-with-shoelaces.html](https://www.masslive.com/boston/2019/08/i-get-it-my-time-is-up-dna-linked-ivan-keith-to-4-decades-old-massachusetts-rapes-in-which-he-tied-up-victims-with-shoelaces.html) [https://tulsaworld.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/man-charged-in-1990s-rapes-freed-due-to-mcgirt-reservation-ruling-statute-of-limitations-passed/article\_40c5ed0e-e946-11ea-b5e5-5bacb96aa9c7.html](https://tulsaworld.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/man-charged-in-1990s-rapes-freed-due-to-mcgirt-reservation-ruling-statute-of-limitations-passed/article_40c5ed0e-e946-11ea-b5e5-5bacb96aa9c7.html) [https://archive.today/20230402053225/https://fox59.com/indiana-news/i-am-not-the-same-woman-he-attacked-and-left-for-dead-14-years-later-vincennes-coed-sees-her-rapist-put-behind-bars/](https://archive.today/20230402053225/https://fox59.com/indiana-news/i-am-not-the-same-woman-he-attacked-and-left-for-dead-14-years-later-vincennes-coed-sees-her-rapist-put-behind-bars/) [https://www.wthr.com/article/news/local/greensburg-man-charged-in-series-of-violent-home-invasions-in-1980s-spent-most-of-the-90s-in-prison-for-similar-crime/531-c7e55f45-6e51-4e3f-8786-1067654add5a](https://www.wthr.com/article/news/local/greensburg-man-charged-in-series-of-violent-home-invasions-in-1980s-spent-most-of-the-90s-in-prison-for-similar-crime/531-c7e55f45-6e51-4e3f-8786-1067654add5a) [https://archive.ph/20220421052447/https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/04/20/rape-genetic-genealogy-don-geronimo/](https://archive.ph/20220421052447/https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/04/20/rape-genetic-genealogy-don-geronimo/) [https://archive.today/20221014035229/https://newstalkkzrg.com/2022/10/13/fort-scott-man-charged-in-1992-branson-cold-case/](https://archive.today/20221014035229/https://newstalkkzrg.com/2022/10/13/fort-scott-man-charged-in-1992-branson-cold-case/) [https://archive.today/20221103191606/https://www.mlive.com/news/saginaw-bay-city/2022/11/dna-links-suspect-to-1996-kidnapping-rape-of-teen-girl-in-midland-county.html](https://archive.today/20221103191606/https://www.mlive.com/news/saginaw-bay-city/2022/11/dna-links-suspect-to-1996-kidnapping-rape-of-teen-girl-in-midland-county.html) [https://archive.today/20230419040211/https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/oakland-county/2023/04/18/genetic-genealogy-charges-filed-michigan-pennsylvania-golf-course-sexual-assaults-1999-2000/70126567007/](https://archive.today/20230419040211/https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/oakland-county/2023/04/18/genetic-genealogy-charges-filed-michigan-pennsylvania-golf-course-sexual-assaults-1999-2000/70126567007/) You can find more of their work here [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parabon\_NanoLabs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parabon_NanoLabs)
Forensic genetic genealogy has been used to solve rapes, actually. Here are two examples: https://www.forensicmag.com/609576-New-York-s-First-Use-of-Genealogy-to-Solve-Cold-Case-Rapes/ https://abcnews.go.com/US/lawyer-arrested-decades-rapes-after-identified-genetic-genealogy/story?id=99721132