A 19-year-old woman was caught in Florida on charges that she had a baby in the bathroom of her college dorm room, killed the baby girl, and then threw the body away.
The Hillsborough County State Attorney’s Office says Brianna Moore is charged with gravely hurting or killing a child and neglecting a kid while they were hurt badly.
While Moore was living at the University of Tampa in McKay Hall, his friends heard a baby crying and saw blood on the bathroom floor on April 27.
They called the police. When paramedics checked on Moore, she said she wasn’t pregnant and that the blood was from her period.
They called the police again the next day when they found a bloody towel in Moore’s trash can. When police arrived, they took off the towel and found the dead baby inside.
“Moore told Tampa Police that day that she had given birth in the bathroom and held the baby close to her body until it stopped crying,” authorities said.
Moore then said that he had thrown the girl away. A story on her arrest by the Tampa Bay Times said that she told police after Hurricane Irma that she thought the baby was dead.
It is said that she cleaned the girl with water in the bathroom and then put her on the floor of her bedroom and fell asleep for an hour.
The girl still didn’t seem to be alive when she woke up, so the statement says she wrapped the baby in the towel. Investigators think she was trying to hide the fact that she was pregnant.
An autopsy showed that she died of asphyxiation after her body was squished together. She had broken several ribs and was bleeding on the lung. The death was caused by murder.
After getting a warrant for her arrest, police nabbed her in her home state of Mississippi. She is waiting to be sent back to Florida.
She is also being charged with illegally keeping, transporting, or storing human remains and not telling the medical investigator or police about the death.
While I’m thinking about how this woman could have saved this baby girl’s life by calling for help, it breaks my heart. She instead did things that directly caused the death of her infant child.
It’s going to be hard and complicated to prosecute this case, and our community needs to keep teaching women about all the tools they can use in situations like this.
Police could have saved this baby’s life, said State Attorney Suzy Lopez in a statement.
Like many other states, Florida has a law called “Safe Haven” that lets people leave unwanted babies at a fire station or hospital for 30 days with no questions asked. Lopez said Moore could have done it without much trouble.
Lopez said in a news conference, “For crying out loud, there’s a fire station across the street from the University of Tampa.” He seemed to be holding back tears. “It only takes two or three minutes to drive to Tampa General Hospital.”
