Documents reveal more details in baby-throwing case
By JOSH POLTILOVE | The Tampa Tribune
The child was found face down on the side of Interstate 275, his body cold to the touch and his skull fractured.
Emanuel Wesley Murray, 3 months old, died due to blunt impact to his head, which caused skull fractures, according to medical examiner reports included in nearly 500 pages of documents released today.
Richard McTear Jr. is charged with first-degree murder in the May 5 slaying of his ex-girlfriend's son. Hillsborough County deputies say McTear dropped Emanuel on a concrete floor, then drove off with the baby and threw him on the side of the interstate just south of Fowler Avenue.
Among the documents: witness interviews, police reports and letters McTear wrote from behind bars.
Several documents have not been released while McTear's lawyers fight to keep them suppressed.
But included are conversations Bedwell had with investigators after the attack.
At St. Joseph's Hospital early that morning, she told deputies that McTear had beaten and choked her. She asked where her baby was, and a deputy told her that her child had been found and was dead.
Bedwell wept and said, "No, not my baby! He killed my baby!"
Bedwell couldn't immediately answer any more questions from investigators.
In an interview less than six hours after the slaying, Bedwell cried throughout her conversation with deputies at St. Joseph's Hospital emergency room.
She said she had been in a relationship with McTear for nine or 10 months and that it had been violent. He had threatened to take the baby, and he called her about 6 p.m. May 4 and told her he was going to come there and break into her apartment and kill her and the baby, she later told investigators. She went to a friend's house that night.
About 3 a.m. May 5, she decided she needed to go home because she had school that day. Inside her home, she said, was McTear, and he punched her. He didn't have a key, she said, so she was not positive how he got in her home. Emanuel was asleep in a car seat at the time.
She told McTear that her baby was right there, and McTear told her "he gonna get it too," Bedwell said.
He told her he was upset about her relationship with another man, and he poured a can of soda in her baby's face and spit in the baby's face, she later told investigators.
She told him not to do anything to her baby, she said, and McTear told her he was going to get a gun.
"But before that he swung the baby out on the car seat. He just slung the car seat with the baby in it," Bedwell said. "He slung him in the kitchen first and then he slung him into the living room on the floor."
The baby flew out of the car seat after one of the tosses, Bedwell said. McTear told her to make the baby be quiet before he killed them both. She picked up the baby and tried to escape, and he took the baby from her hands.
During the attack, she said, he grabbed her, beat her and "he was biting me everywhere. ⦠And I got a bite mark on my back and stuff. And on my neck over here, I got a bite mark."
She didn't think McTear would really kill the baby, and her instinct was to get help, so she ran to call police. He took the baby and left, she said.
Asked what set McTear off so much, she told an investigator to listen to her voice mail. McTear was calling her and calling her, and she wouldn't answer her phone, she said, "Cause he told me the other day he was gonna kill me and my baby and I just left my house."
In retrospect, she told deputies, she felt guilty about leaving to try to get help.
"Emanuel was screaming to the top of his lung," she said. "And I just felt so bad for leaving him there and I feel like all this my fault for leaving him."
McTear was jealous of another man in Bedwell's life as well, she said.
She said her sister told her that McTear had called, saying "Don't worry about it cause I already kill her baby today or already did or something."
At the time, she told deputies McTear might be with his friend Anthony, who is part of "Dirty Game," a Sulphur Springs crew. She said McTear had never lived with her but had stayed the night with her many times. He no longer kept things there, she said.
McTear, 21, remains without bail in Orient Road Jail.
McTear refused to be interviewed after his arrest. Deputies say he told them, "I'm straight. I'll talk to a lawyer first."
Bedwell's sister Alicia told deputies that she spoke with McTear the morning of the slaying. When she asked McTear where her nephew was, McTear responded, but defense lawyers are trying to keep that comment suppressed.
Deputies asked Alicia Bedwell what she thought McTear meant by his statement. "She stated that she thought he had just left the baby somewhere, not knowing he had killed the baby or thrown the child from the car window. She stated, 'I didn't think the baby was dead.'"
Thomas Scaglione, Bedwell's teacher at an adult center, contacted deputies May 6.
He said that on the afternoon of May 4, Bedwell made a remark to him in front of other students that her baby had been "tooken" from the mall. Scaglione asked Bedwell if it was true, and she smiled and said she was just joking.
Scaglione told deputies that after the lunch hour, he saw Bedwell talk on her cell phone inside his classroom. She stated, "You better give me back my [expletive] baby, you [expletive]!" Scaglione reminded Bedwell that she's not allowed to use her cell phone during class, according to the rules of the adult center.
He also told deputies that her baby had been enrolled within the daycare center on site for the teen mothers who attend the school. Scaglione told deputies that he thinks the phone call happened about 1:30 p.m. May 4. He thought this was relevant because Bedwell was supposed to be in a temporary injunction hearing that day but was in school.
http://www2.tbo.com/content/2009/aug/04/041914/documents-reveal-more-details-baby-throwing-case/news-breaking/