A woman is on trial for a second time, accused of murdering her newborn after hiding her pregnancy.
In 2020, Andee Wright allegedly gave birth to a baby boy, struck the newborn on the head twice, and then left his body in a garbage can. She was found in medical distress by her boyfriend, who called 911. Initially, it was believed that Wright had suffered a stillbirth, but an investigation led to Wright being indicted by a grand jury on two counts of second-degree murder.
Erie County District Attorney John J. Flynn said it was possibly the “worst case” he had ever seen. “It raised my eyebrows, and it was a situation where I wanted a full-blown investigation on the matter,” he said, according to Law and Crime. He denied it was a situation of an attempted at-home abortion when asked by reporters. “I had to make sure that the baby was born. I had to make sure that my i’s were dotted and my t’s were crossed and I was 100 percent sure beyond a reasonable doubt of going to a court of law that it was not a miscarriage. When I say quick, it was quick.”
Flynn said a “precise, edge-like instrument or object” was used to bash the newborn baby’s skull in.
READ: Pressured to abort one baby with spina bifida and one with Trisomy 18, they trusted God instead
In December of 2023, the first trial ended. In the first trial, a defense witness argued that the fractures in the baby’s skull came from when the baby’s body fell into the toilet, and was then dropped. But the deputy chief medical examiner for Erie County testified that the amount of force needed to cause those fractures was equivalent to falling out of a second-story window, and just falling into a toilet wouldn’t have been enough. Both experts agreed that the brain hemorrhage found could only have happened if the baby was born alive.
“How long are we going to pretend we don’t know exactly what happened and exactly who did it?” Assistant District Attorney Ryan Haggerty told the jury. Ultimately, a mistrial was declared after the jury was deadlocked, and a second trial was ordered to be held this year.
Wright’s new trial is currently in progress, and jurors were told that this wasn’t the first time Wright has hidden a pregnancy. In 2012, she denied being pregnant when confronted, only to go into labor a few days later. She had been told by a doctor she was pregnant five months earlier but admitted it to no one until she actually gave birth. Prosecutors say the same thing happened in 2020.
Assistant District Attorney Ashley Morgan said Wright kept the baby a secret for as long as she could, and then she killed him. During opening statements, Morgan said, “[Wright] found him as meaningless as an empty shampoo bottle he shared a bag with.”
