CUMBERLAND COUNTY: It’s doubtful the baby ever had a name.
He was killed less than a day after he was born. Police don’t know where that was – it could have been in a car, maybe a cheap motel, maybe a closet.
He was thrown out of a car, and found hours later along the side of Canady Pond Road, on the south side of Cumberland County, at about 2 p.m. March 3, 1999. A soldier and his younger brother were looking for their aunt’s house and noticed a black plastic bag blowing in the breeze. They saw something that looked like a baby doll but stopped anyway. It was too late for CPR, so they called 911.
The Cumberland County Sheriff’s Office responded, and they were immediately shocked and sickened – not at the sight of the baby, but at the thought of a mother who could do such a thing.
The autopsy painted a chilling picture. The baby was not stillborn – he was born healthy, and the mother did not abuse drugs or alcohol. Within hours of birth, he was beaten to death and then thrown from a speeding car.
More than eight years have passed since the incident, but the infant’s picture is still posted in elevators at the sheriff’s office. Many officers say they still think of him every day.
They named him Michael, after the patron saint of law enforcement. They had a funeral for him, bought him a casket and clothes in which he was buried. A sheriff’s star is engraved on his black granite tombstone.
“He’s in a grave with a marker on it that says baby Michael, but that’s not who he really is,” said Sam Pennica, who was an SBI agent when the baby was discovered. He took a job as head of the homicide division at the sheriff’s office in 2001.
The baby Michael case led him there, and although he has moved on to a job as director of the Wake County City and County Bureau of Identification, the case still haunts him.
“Michael has a family and an identity and he deserves to have that,” he said.
When Pennica came on as head of homicide, he took a hard look at the evidence in the case. There wasn’t much, but he found something that had the potential to break the case wide open. The placenta had a blood clot on the side – the mother’s. A DNA profile was put into CODIS, the combined DNA index system. The database, maintained by the FBI, holds nearly 4.3 million names, most of convicted felons, some unknown perpetrators of crimes.
The profile confirmed what police already thought they knew but told them little else. The mother was white, but could be Hispanic or American Indian. She wasn’t on drugs.
Initially in the investigation, officers were grasping at straws. Without knowing the identity of the victim, Lieutenant Charlie Disponzio said, officers don’t know much.
“We set up a roadblock, a checkpoint, and you just start stopping every car that travels that road,” he said. “We contacted the jails; we were contacting women released from jail that were pregnant, to see if they had their baby yet.”
The investigation took them to South Carolina. It had officers following up on hundreds of leads, delivered by way of an anonymous phone calls, jailhouse snitches and nosy neighbors. After the DNA profile was made, they went back to women whose names came up in the initial investigation. No matches.
Then, in 2002, a woman confessed. She had the baby and her husband sent her to the hospital by herself, promising her that he and the baby were right behind her. Neither the husband, nor the baby, ever made it to the hospital.
Officers were ecstatic, and they dug into this woman’s past. She and her husband were going through a bitter divorce, and it turns out the woman was treated for depression in December of 1998, just three months before Michael was born. They subpoenaed her hospital records, and all their hopes were dashed. The woman took a pregnancy test that December, and it was negative. Michael was a full term, healthy baby. She was not his mother.
Police try not to assume too much about who Michael’s mother is, or whether she is the only person responsible for murdering the child. But it’s hard to avoid speculating what was going through her mind that day.
It very likely could have been panic. The site where Michael was discarded is close to a county landfill, and investigators learned it was closed that day. If baby Michael was thrown away there, Pennica admits, police likely never would have discovered him.
The alternative is chilling: the unimaginable callousness of a murderer who just doesn’t care.
Despite the years that have passed, people at the sheriff’s office maintain hope that one day the murder will be solved. They have the DNA, and they know only one phone call could break the case. And they await that call. A secret like that can’t stay hidden.
