A northeastern Pennsylvania man was arrested and charged with killing his newborn daughter by dropping a cinderblock on her head because he and his girlfriend couldn’t afford another child.
According to police, Christopher Fitzpatrick’s girlfriend began experiencing labor pains while the couple and Fitzpatrick’s 11-year-old sister were inside a grocery store on May 28.
“Have this f*cking baby,” Mr. Fitzpatrick, 20, allegedly told Jennifer A. Barrise, 28. “I just want to get rid of it. I gotta do what I gotta do.” Barrise asked him twice if he intended to kill their baby, but she never received a response.
The three returned to their car in the parking lot of the grocery store where Barrise gave birth to an apparently healthy baby girl, who landed on the floor of the car. None of the three touched the crying baby.
Later that day, Fitzpatrick took the baby to his job, a lawn care business, where he dropped a cinderblock twice on the baby’s head. Fitzpatrick and Barrise already had a 1-year-old boy together. She reportedly had 5 other children by different men.
According to the Times-Tribune, the next day, May 29, at a family gathering, Mr. Fitzpatrick’s sister told her parents that Barrise gave birth in the car. The parents, Scott and Michelle Fitzpatrick, pressed their son for an answer. He told them that he had taken the baby to a local hospital.
Fitzpatrick later led state troopers to the location where he buried the baby’s body.
Ruth DiPalma, the owner of the lawn care business where Fitzpatrick worked since April, told the Times-Tribune, “This was not the person we hired. It’s a different person. He was completely clean. His driver’s license was clean. We had no reason not to hire a man with no previous problems.”
