They Threw Their Newborn Son Into a Dumpster

The baby they never loved; a horrible crime.

Amy Grossberg gave birth to a baby boy in a motel room. She began screaming at her boyfriend, Brian Peterson, to get rid of it. He covered the baby with a towel, went to his car to get a plastic bag, put the baby in the bag, tied the drawstrings, and calmly walked to a dumpster and tossed the baby in it. They drove back to college and acted as though nothing had happened. They might have gotten away with their crime if Amy had not developed eclampsia. She experienced extreme swelling all over her body and was complaining of being sore and tired. Then she started having seizures. The college had her rushed to the hospital. When she was examined, the ER staff called in an OB/GYN. She had not passed the afterbirth and a portion of the umbilical cord was still visible externally. The OB/GYN recognized the symptoms as soon as he walked in. They knew she had given birth to a baby and prodded her to tell where it was. All she would say was that she did not know.

The hospital told Amy's mother that she had given birth. Her mother called Brian and demanded he tell her everything he knew. Once he learned that everybody knew she had given birth, he admitted it and said he got rid of the baby and that he didn't think it was alive. When they asked where the body was, he refused to tell them, stating that he did not know. He finally admitted that he threw it in a dumpster somewhere. Police began a search of dumpsters in the area where he said he had been. They stopped the garbage trucks from picking and began searching dumpsters. They brought out cadaver dogs.

Lisa Nyland, a dog handler with Maryland Natural Resources Police brought her yellow lab, Jesse, to help. When they neared one dumpster, he started barking. She crawled into the dumpster and began searching. She found the bag with the body and radioed it in.

The baby was taken for an autopsy. He had been alive and breathing on his own. There was air in the bowel and lungs, and hemorrhages in the brain: all signs that the heart had been beating and the lungs were picking up air. There was a deep indentation in the top of the baby's skull, roughly thumb-sized and shaped. A fracture ran away from the hole and was slightly raised. The baby's skull had been split almost open.

The parents of this couple spent more than a million dollars on their defense. Several things about this case are absolutely unbelievable. When Amy was five months pregnant, she had a physical. The doctor failed to discover that she was pregnant, even though he felt and poked around on her stomach. Her parents failed to notice that she was pregnant. Nobody from the college ever mentioned the pregnancy to her parents.