Mom On Trial In Drowning Of Newborn In Toilet
MOBILE, AL. -- Jurors in Tina Machelle Graham's murder trial heard a recording Monday of a 911 call the defendant made early last year from her Shalimar Road home in west Mobile, asking for help.
She was asking for help because she was bleeding, prosecutors told jurors as Graham's trial got under way.
She was bleeding, Mobile County Assistant District Attorney Jo Beth Murphree said, because hours earlier Graham had given birth to a "perfect, healthy, seven-pound girl."
The birth occurred at about 2 a.m. on Feb. 15, 2004, jurors gathered before Circuit Judge Rick Stout were told.
Graham's 911 call did not come until as many as eight hours later, according to the prosecutor -- long after Graham had allowed the newborn to drown in a toilet. After Graham gave birth, Murphree said, she wrapped her little girl in a red covering, locked her body in a hall closet, and took a nap.
Only after Graham awoke from the nap, bleeding and in need of help herself -- with no thought for the infant, who by then had already stiffened into rigor mortis, Murphree told jurors -- did she think to seek medical attention.
"She didn't want the baby (and) couldn't afford it," Murphree said of Graham, 39, a woman described by her own attorney as having difficulty holding down jobs and struggling to care for three other children.
She wouldn't get an abortion, Murphree said, and she kept her pregnancy hidden from everyone, including her family.
And then on that Saturday night, the baby came.
Far from the cold-blooded act of destroying an unwanted baby, defense attorney Jeff Deen argued, his client's actions occurred because she was suffering then and now from mental stress and defect and was not responsible.
When her baby was born, Deen said, "this good mother of three daughters ... became frozen. She was not in touch with reality; she was totally out of her mind."
Deen promised jurors he would produce evidence showing that Graham had suffered from mental deficiency since she was a young teenager, had an IQ of under 90 and that her mental problems were hereditary.
When the infant began to emerge from her womb and slip into the toilet, Deen suggested, Graham experienced a "psychotic episode.
"She thought it was stillborn," Deen told jurors. "She was unable to reach down and grab her baby daughter."
During the state's presentation of the tapes, jurors on Monday heard a calm and articulate Graham speaking with emergency workers during a handful of telephone calls.
She asked that there be no sirens as emergency or police vehicles arrived because she didn't want to upset her other children.
At first Graham avoided mentioning the birth of the child and was vague about what was causing her physical distress, but ultimately began divulging what had happened.
"I passed a baby," she said at one point. "I just didn't know what to do. It happened so quick."
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Posted by Editor at November 29, 2005 08:57 AM
