THREE KIDS, ONE DEATH

Six pounds, two ounces; 20 inches long. Ordinarily, those figures would be a source of joy to new parents, instantly memorized and endlessly repeated. But the size of the child born to Amy Grossberg and Brian Peterson Jr. will not be engraved on any birth announcements. In this case, the thought the numbers suggest is anything but joyful: Six pounds, two ounces; 20 inches long–what a tiny person to have been killed.

Baby Boy Grossberg, as he is being called, was born at about 4 a.m. on Tuesday, Nov. 12, in Room 220 of the Comfort Inn, a motel in Newark, Delaware. Earlier that night, Grossberg, 18, a freshman at the University of Delaware, had called her boyfriend Peterson, also 18, and told him that she was going into labor. Peterson then drove from Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania, where he is a freshman, to meet Grossberg. They went to the motel, and she gave birth.

What happened next is a matter of dispute. Peterson has told authorities that he wrapped the infant in a garbage bag and threw it in the motel’s Dumpster. He says the baby was alive. But the autopsy reveals that the boy died from multiple skull fractures with injury to the brain “due to blunt force head trauma and shaking.” The implication is that Grossberg and Peterson did not merely abandon the child but beat it and killed it. Delaware has charged the youths with murder. If they are found guilty, they could be executed.

Nothing in the lives of Amy Grossberg and Brian Peterson explains how they could have brought such tragedy on themselves. Both from affluent families, they lived in prosperous New Jersey suburbs and so would not have faced a desperate economic predicament if they had a child. Their material well-being aside, they were also apparently happy, successful, likable kids. Amy was a talented artist and worked at a ymca camp last summer–“a dream daughter,” her lawyer said. Brian was co-captain of the high school soccer team and on the varsity golf team. “He was popular–he had a lot of friends,” says Brian Thalmann, who went to Ramapo High School with the couple. “She was nice too. No one can believe these are the same people. No one knows what to think.”

The romance began in the couple’s junior year in high school, and they went to both the junior and senior proms together. At the latter, Grossberg must already have been several weeks pregnant. They still seemed to be in love after heading off to different colleges, and perhaps their secret isolated them and drew them even closer. They didn’t tell their parents or friends about the pregnancy or seek any counseling. Grossberg wore baggy clothes to hide her condition, although her college roommates reportedly suspected it. But they didn’t feel they could discuss it with her.

After the baby arrived, the couple slept for a few hours, then returned to their colleges. At 5:30 that afternoon, though, Grossberg fainted in her dorm room. She was taken to a hospital, where doctors discovered that she had given birth within the past 12 hours and notified police that a baby might be missing. Grossberg’s roommate told the police about Peterson, and they called Gettysburg College. There, a dormitory adviser and a campus security officer approached Peterson, who told them where the baby was. The police found bloody bed linens in each of the couple’s dorm rooms, and in Peterson’s, a map of Newark and a receipt from the White Glove Car Wash.

Over the next few days, police questioned Grossberg and Peterson, then released them to the custody of their parents. But after the autopsy was completed on Saturday, Delaware’s attorney general announced that the couple were being charged with first-degree murder and that the state would seek the death penalty (murdering a child under 14 is a capital offense in Delaware). Grossberg surrendered and was held without bail and ordered to undergo psychiatric evaluation.

Peterson, though, hid out for a few days with his parents, who are divorced, before turning himself in last Thursday morning. His lawyer, Joseph Hurley, had announced this ahead of time, and a huge crowd of reporters and onlookers greeted Peterson. Someone jeered, “Baby killer!” and Peterson’s distraught mother cried, “I want to go with him! I want to go with him!”

As he had all week, Hurley asked for sympathy for his client. He said that when they met for the first time, Peterson “was full of twitches, he had an uncontrollable nervous laughter, his face was flushing, his voice was trembling. He’s a very scared kid.” Earlier Hurley said that Peterson had not expressed any sorrow over the death of the child. Hurley also defended the parents’ harboring a fugitive and reported that Peterson’s mother, hearing her son might face the death penalty, wanted him to flee the country. She thought of Iraq or Syria as his havens since they don’t have extradition treaties with the U.S.

The true mystery of this case won’t be solved by evidence and police work, for it lies within the minds of these two young people. What led them to behave so inexplicably? Why didn’t they contact a confidential abortion clinic or adoption agency? In love, of age, did they consider getting married? Having gone through the ordeal of a covert birth, why didn’t they leave the child at a hospital? True, young mothers, alone and terrified, have been known to abandon their newborns. But how could two secure, educated 18-year-olds convince themselves that this was the best of all alternatives? And if indeed they did crack the baby’s skull, what possessed them to do so? To understand all is to forgive all, the old saying goes. Understanding Grossberg and Peterson seems a long way off.

–Reported by Elaine Rivera/Wyckoff, New Jersey