Kelli Murphy is facing reckless or criminally negligent manslaughter juvenile offence charges following the death of Brooklyn Foss-Greenaway in July. No photographs have been released of the alleged killer, as she becomes the youngest person to face the charge in the state of Maine in at least 25 years.
An autopsy on baby Brooklyn found large quantities of prescription medication in her system, the same used by Murphy to control her ADHD.
The juvenile petition against Murphy contains no details about the case, including Brooklyn's cause of death, although the baby's mother, Nicki Greenaway, claims to have been told she was suffocated. When Greenaway saw her daughter for the first time at a funeral home, the baby had a black eye, bruises on her nose and marks that looked like fingerprints on her cheeks, she said.
Greenaway dropped the child off at Murphy's mother, Amanda Huard's home on July 7, for an overnight stay. She was found dead early the following morning.
Huard is not facing charges herself, though Ms Greenaway says she holds her responsible and the Department of Health and Human services said an agency review showed she had neglected the three-month-old child.
'Brooklyn Foss-Greenaway has died as a result of your neglect,' said the notice.
'You knew that (the 10-year-old) should not be babysitting children but have continued to allow her to do so.'
Deputy Attorney General William Stokes told the Portland Press Herald that prosecutors are not pushing for Murphy to be tried as an adult, so she will not get a jury trial. If the case goes to trial a ruling will be made by a judge who deals with juveniles.
'The whole focus of the juvenile justice system and juvenile code is to provide treatment and care and be able to deal with the conduct recognizing the juvenile is a child,' Stokes said.
'The system is designed not to look at the punitive side of things.' He added that Murphy is not alleged to have deliberately killed the child - an act which would typically result in a murder charge.
Brooklyn's mother, Nicki, said traces of the 10-year-old's medication was found in her daughter's system
Murphy had already been labeled as a danger to children, according to documents from the DHHS which detail that she suffers behavioral problems, including oppositional defiant disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and attachment disorder.
Former tenants of Huard's house have claimed Murphy also harmed their baby.
Ashley Tenney and Chad Hopkins have named the 10-year-old as being responsible for their daughter's hospitalisation in June, brought on by sudden seizures. Doctors found the same medication in eight-month-old Jaylynn's system that is used by the accused girl to control her attention deficit hyperactivity disorder after they had been left alone together.
Tenney and Hopkins were living with Amanda Huard, mother of the accused, in the basement of their home, the Maine Sunday Telegram reported. They say the girl was alone with their daughter on June 19, while Hopkins was elsewhere in the house and Tenney was out at work. The couple trusted the girl, they said, that she had shown a 'healthy interest' in their daughter up until that point, offering to help with diaper changes and bathing.
When Tenney arrived home from her shift at Dunkin' Donuts she found her daughter pale and sweating.
'She was soaked in sweat, just drenched,' said Tenney, 20. 'She was so pale. Whiter than a sheet of paper.'
As they rushed her to the emergency room at MaineGeneral Medical Centre in Waterville, Jaylynn began convulsing and fitting. 'She was on her father's lap, and her head just dropped back, and she rapidly started shaking,' Tenney said. 'The first one lasted like 20 seconds.'
The sudden seizures baffled doctors at first as they struggled to work out what had brought them on.
Medical experts consulted one another and Jaylynn was transferred to Maine Medical Centre in Portland to be reassessed.
'If her head went to the left her arm went to the right and vice versa,' she said. 'Her heart rate was high and they were worried and didn't know what to do for her.'
In Portland doctors probed Tenney about what medications were in Huard's house, matching up the 10-year-old's attention deficit hyperactivity disorder drugs with what they found in Jaylynn's system. So much was detected, Tenney said, that her daughter 'should have been dead'. She added that there 'wasn't any way' she could have ingested the medication on her own.
In the days following the scare Tenney and Hopkins began looking for a new place to live, sickened by the belief that Huard's daughter had deliberately hurt their own. She said she had found a canvas bag in a drawer in the 10-year-old's bedroom, filled with more than 100 photographs of Jaylynn, some torn, others with words like 'my baby girl' written on them.
The couple were interviewed by workers from the DHHS Office of Child and Family Services, as were with the 10-year-old and her mother. All four were told that the girl should not be given care of young children.
But despite the warnings the girl was once again left alone with a toddler just three weeks later, this time three-month-old Brooklyn Foss-Greenaway whose mother, Nicki, had left in Huard's care overnight.
On July 9 Tenney said she was woken at 1.30am to the sound of crying, pounding footsteps and the word 'dead'. Brooklyn died during the course of that night, the ADHD drug present in her system.
Speaking at the time of the charge against Murphy being brought, Greenaway told the Bangor Daily News: 'I’m definitely glad they’re finally doing something. 'I just didn’t know when they were going to do it. [The last couple of days have been] pretty overwhelming.'
Greenaway, who reportedly has three other children, ages 2, 15 and 16, said the last two months have been full of 'a lot of heartache and a lot of patience.'
