Baby dies in New York after being thrown out a window, mother under psychiatric evaluation
Date October 17, 2015 - 5:41AM
Al Baker, Marc Santora and Emily Palmer
Police officers stand guard near the apartment building in the Bronx where the 6-month-old girl died. Photo: AP
New York: The screaming from Apartment 6D began on Wednesday night. By midday on Thursday, one neighbour said, Tenisha N. Fearon was yelling, "I'm going to throw the baby."
"She was saying, 'Hallelujah, praise God, we're all going to die,'" said the neighbour, Lizette Rodriguez, 48, who lived three floors below Fearon in the Bronx. "She was arguing with herself."
By 2pm, residents who had heard the screams clambered up a fire escape to a nearby rooftop to urge Fearon to stop. The view inside her sixth-floor apartment, said Gregorio Lopez, 47, who lived next door to her and had joined his neighbours on the roof, was disturbing: Fearon, 27, naked and trying to break a window as three of her four children lay in a line on the floor, all of them also naked.
Moments earlier, witnesses told the authorities, Fearon had dangled her youngest child, 6-month-old Junilah Lawrence, from the window, then thrown her. The girl landed on the pavement below and was pronounced dead a short time later at St Barnabas Hospital.
"I heard the thump when I was on the phone with 911," said Rodriguez, describing the moment when Junilah landed. "And I gasped, 'Oh my God.'"
From the rooftop, a cry went out: "Everybody screamed, 'No!'" Rodriguez said. "What did you do?"
The police, responding to a flurry of 911 calls, had to break down the door to Fearon's apartment to get in.
Fearon was taken into police custody and sent to a hospital for a psychiatric evaluation. The police said that her three other children - a boy, 10, and two girls, 8 and 4 - had been safely removed and were placed with New York City's child welfare agency. On Friday, she was arraigned on murder charges, according to local media.
Her godmother, Luella Hatch, told CBS on Friday that she questioned whether Fearon had postnatal depression.
"This is a disease and nobody detects it," she told the TV station. "If you're sick, you don't know what you're doing."
The death of Junilah, born on April 10, was the third time in recent months that babies in the city had been fatally thrown from a window of their own home. The death left relatives and neighbours of Fearon and the authorities wondering what had happened.
Stephen Davis, the Police Department's chief spokesman said officers had visited Fearon's home two other times, in 2001 and 2002, for cases in which she had been a victim of domestic disputes.
He said the motive for the episode on Thursday was still being investigated.
"It looks like that she, initially, she might have done this," he said. "But why? I don't know."
Her sister Alicia Fearon, 33, said by phone on Thursday afternoon as she arrived at the beige brick building in Fordham Heights where Fearon lived: "Tenisha loved her children dearly, and she cared for her children 100 percent. This is a shocker for us."
She said that she and other relatives were not aware of any mental or emotional illnesses that Fearon might have had. Asked why something like this could happen, she said: "I don't know. I really don't know."
Another sister, Tamica Fearon, 32, also reached by phone, said: "Something must have gone wrong. Something must have gone very wrong."
Carol Watson, who lives in the building and said she had known Fearon for years, said that what happened did not make any sense.
"Something must have snapped," Watson said. "She was a good mother and very protective of those children. All I can tell you is that something must have snapped. She must have had a breakdown or something."
"The children were always clean and well looked after," she added. "But you never know what is going on in someone's head. People are under all kinds of stress these days."
She said Fearon raised the children alone.
"She was all alone," she said. "Her mother is dead."
Citing privacy rules, a spokesman for the child welfare agency, the Administration for Children's Services, declined to say whether Fearon had any dealings with it.
"We are currently investigating the circumstances that led to this tragic incident and are actively working to ensure the well-being of the three remaining children in this household," the agency's spokesman, Christopher McKniff, said.
In the two other recent episodes in which a baby was thrown from a window in the city, the mothers faced criminal charges.
Last month, Jennifer Berry, 33, was accused of throwing her newborn girl from the seventh-floor window of an apartment building in the Bronx. In August, the mother of a 3-week-old boy who died after plummeting from a fourth-floor window in Queens was charged with intentionally killing her child.
The New York Times
