Jury enters third day in deliberations of abandoned baby case

MANCHESTER, NH – After deliberating eight hours over two days, a Hillsborough County Superior Court North jury on Thursday left the courthouse without returning a verdict in the case of a woman accused of abandoning her premature newborn in freezing temperatures in December 2022.

Alexandra Eckersley, 27, is being tried on charges of two counts of second-degree assault; falsifying physical evidence; endangering the welfare of a child, and reckless conduct.  On Dec. 26, 2022, she gave birth to a son in a makeshift tent in the woods in Goffstown, across the trestle bridge from the rail trail near the West Side Ice Arena.  The baby weighed a little more than 4 pounds.

Prosecutors say Eckersley led searchers a half-mile in the wrong direction from where they found the infant on the floor of the tent. When the baby was found and brought to the hospital, its skin temperature was 82.7 degrees Fahrenheit.

Eckersley maintains her innocence, saying she thought the baby had died since George Theberge, her 45-year-old boyfriend, told her the infant had no pulse.

In a 911 call, she also said she told the operator the baby was alive (the baby had cried for less than a minute, she testified) but the operator relayed information that the infant wasn’t viable.  She also told an officer, who arrived on the scene, that the baby had cried, indicative that the infant was breathing.

On Thursday, jurors deliberated during lunch and a little after 1 p.m., they sent out a question concerning the phrase “to wit.”   They wrote: “In each charge, does the phrase ‘to wit’ apply to knowledge of whether the defendant knows if Edward Eckersley is living or deceased?”  Edward Eckersley is Eckersley’s son who survived, is now 19-months-old and lives with her and his grandmother, Nancy Eckersley.

Judge Amy Messier wrote back that “to wit” simply means “that is to say” or “namely.”   She said it “is for the jury to decide, based on the law given to you in the instructions and the facts, as you find them to be, whether the state has proved each element beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Eckersley and her family, including her father, Red Sox great Dennis Eckersley, were in the courthouse waiting for a verdict.

On Wednesday, Eckersley testified about what happened on Dec. 25-26, 2022.  She said she was unaware she was pregnant and while she has a high school diploma, she never took a sex education class.  A Catholic Medical Center emergency room physician testified on Monday that the baby had a gestational age of 7 to 8 months.

Eckersley, however, testified she never felt the baby move, that she didn’t have a big belly and that she wore a size 0.

She said after her boyfriend told her the baby had no pulse, the two of them left the tent to head toward the West Side Ice Arena to call 911 for help.  She said she didn’t bring the infant with her because “I thought he was dead.”

In the 911 call, Eckersley did not give the dispatcher the exact location where the infant could be found.  She told the dispatcher, however, that the tent was on the Goffstown side of the trestle bridge.

Theberge, who she feared and whom she said had hit her in the past, told her not to tell them where the camp was or bring them to the tent, but instead to tell them the baby was near the playing fields, about a half-mile in the opposite direction.

Theberge, who returned to the tent three times to retrieve property, had a habit of turning off the heat because he became too hot; Eckersley would turn it back on.  When he returned to her for the third time, he saw the ambulance arriving and fled, abandoning Eckersley.

Emergency workers treated Eckersley at the scene and then had her help them search the area around the ball fields.  When she began bleeding again through her clothing, she returned to the ambulance for treatment.  After talking further with an EMT, she said something “clicked in her head” and she led them to the tent where they found the baby suffering from hypothermia and in respiratory distress.

Officer William Collins testified last week that he only got a glimpse of the infant before the EMT whisked it away.  The newborn was blue, he said, and he thought it was dead.  He told Eckersley, who was hysterical, that the baby had died.

She learned he was alive at the police station where she was taken to speak with detectives.

“It made me feel happy,” she said.  She named him Edward Ruth after her great grandparents.

The jury of six men and six women will resume deliberations at 9 a.m. on Friday.