STORY: "Aisling Brady McCarthy; Homicide ruling reversed in case of infant’s 2013 death," by reporters Peter Schworm, Patricia Wen and John R. Ellement, published by the Boston Globe on August 31, 2105.
GIST: The state has dropped charges against Aisling Brady McCarthy, the nanny accused of murdering an infant in her care, after the medical examiner’s office reversed itself and said the cause of death was undetermined, rather than a homicide. “Based on an assessment of the present state of the evidence, including the amended ruling from the Medical Examiner who performed the autopsy, the Commonwealth cannot meet its burden of proof,” Middlesex District Attorney Marian Ryan said in a statement. The announcement by prosecutors came just hours after news broke that the medical examiner’s office had changed its conclusion in the death of Rehma Sabir of Cambridge, saying her death was not a homicide caused by blunt force trauma to the head. The medical examiner’s ruling said that the child’s medical history could have made Rehma “prone to easy bleeding with relatively minor trauma.” “I believe that enough evidence has been presented to raise the possibility that the bleeding could have been related to an accidental injury in a child with a bleeding risk or possibly could have even been a result of an undefined natural disease,” the ruling said.........McCarthy’s defense attorney, Melinda Thompson, said, “Miss McCarthy was put in jail for 2½ years over a crime that never occurred. Not just a crime that she did not commit, but a crime that did not occur. The life of an innocent woman was ruined.’’.........McCarthy was arrested in January 2013, five days after 1-year-old Rehma was pronounced dead at Boston Children’s Hospital, where she was rushed after Brady found the infant unresponsive in the child’s Cambridge home. McCarthy, an Irish immigrant living illegally in the United States since 2002, was ordered held without bail. She remained in custody until this May when she was freed on $15,000 cash bail by Superior Court Judge Maureen Hogan, who was assured McCarthy would be deported if the criminal case against her ended. Ryan’s office had alleged that the child was in McCarthy’s care when the girl suffered massive brain injuries consistent with violent shaking, including extensive bleeding in her brain and the backs of her eyes. Specialists said she was subjected to violent force and that the injuries could not have been inflicted before that day. But defense medical experts noted that the child sustained bone and compression fractures several weeks before her death, when she was traveling abroad with her family without McCarthy. They also said the child was sick much of her life and suffered from a bleeding disorder and gastrointestinal problems. Prodded by the defense, the medical examiner’s office reopened its inquiry, and after spending the past several months reviewing forensic information, concluded this month that the infant’s death could no longer be considered a homicide, Thompson said. Ryan, the district attorney, said in a telephone interview that prosecutors were notified late Thursday that the medical examiner’s office had changed its opinion. The office “could no longer opine to a reasonable degree of medical certainty that the injuries were inflicted,” she said. “We weighed all our options,” she said."
The entire story can be found at:
https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2015/08/31/state-medical-examiner-office-changes-finding-finds-homicide-infant-death/yQSNRpNQwWw5Ha29Bhqs4H/story.html
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