CASTLE ROCK, Colo. — A judge has denied bond for a Colorado woman who is accused of throwing her newborn baby over a fence, where he or she then landed on the neighbor’s deck and died there.
According to reports, Camille Wasinger-Konrad, 23, claims she didn’t know she was pregnant until she woke up on Jan. 2 with painful cramps and “[t]he baby just came out.”
Wasinger-Konrad then covered the baby’s mouth so her landlord’s family wouldn’t hear the crying and carried the child into the back yard, where, after 10 minutes of deliberation, she threw the newborn over a nine-foot fence into the neighbor’s yard.
Fox 31 Denver reports that police testified that blood smears indicate that the baby apparently bounced off a railing on the neighbor’s deck and the back of a chair before landing on the deck.
“I just got rid of it,” Wasinger-Konrad allegedly told detectives.
The neighbor, Jeanette Barich, told police that she went on her deck to use the hot tub when she saw her dog sniffing what looked like a baby. She immediately brought the dead child inside, umbilical cord still attached, and called 911.
Police searched the area and found a bloodied shower curtain in a garbage can outside the home where Wasinger-Konrad lived.
Douglas County Detective Adam Moorman told reporters that he spoke to Wasinger-Konrad, but she acted at first as if he didn’t know why he was there. When asked if her DNA would match the baby found on the neighbor’s deck, Wasinger-Konrad allegedly replied, “Well, the thing is that I don’t want to get in trouble.”
She then admitted the truth, explaining what she had done.
Wasinger-Konrad was arrested and charged with first degree murder and tampering with evidence. A judge has denied bond, and Wasinger-Konrad will have her DNA tested and face arraignment on May 22.
As previously reported, in an introductory lecture to his course on obstetrics in 1854, Philadelphia doctor Hugh Lennox Hodge lamented that even the mothers of his day were lacking of natural affection toward their own children and sought out means to kill them.
“They seem not to realize that the being within them is indeed animate, that is, in verity, a human being—body and spirit—that it is of importance, that its value is inestimable, having reference to this world and the next,” he said. “They act with as much indifference as if the living, intelligent, immortal existence lodged within their organs were of no more value than the bread eaten, or the common excretions of the system.”
“We can bear testimony that in some instances, the woman who has been well educated, who occupies high stations in society, whose influence over others is great, and whose character has not been impugned, will deliberately resort to any and every measure which may effectively destroy her unborn offspring,” Hodge sorrowed.
“[S]he recklessly and boldly adopts measures, however severe and dangerous, for the accomplishment of her unnatural, her guilty purpose … that she may be delivered of [a child] for which she has no desire, and whose birth and appearance she dreads.”