Zebrun was unaware of pregnancy until moments before giving birth, lawyer says
The 19-year-old Lackawanna woman accused of murdering her newborn daughter didn’t know she was pregnant until moments before she gave birth alone in a bathroom at her family’s home, her attorney said Wednesday.
Alicia Zebrun also told her lawyer that she was swaddling the baby girl in a blanket when the child stopped breathing.
Believing that the baby had died, she put the newborn girl into a shoe box, got in her car and threw her away in a garbage tote in South Buffalo.
“I think it’s more a tragedy than a crime,” Zebrun’s lawyer, Robert N. Convissar, told The Buffalo News. “But it is a terrible crime.”
Zebrun is facing second-degree murder charges and is being held without bail in the Erie County Holding Center. She was under constant observation at the jail because of the circumstances of her case.
When Convissar met with her Wednesday morning, he said, she was distraught.
“She is upset,” he said. “She is sad. She is crying. She is remorseful. She is in a very bad mental situation regarding her baby. Not for herself, but for her baby.”
Wednesday, Convissar revealed the details of what Zebrun said took place in her home a week ago.
Breathing stopped
On the night of Sept. 17, Zebrun said, she began experiencing intermittent pain. “She could not sleep,” he said. “She was tossing and turning. She took some aspirin. She didn’t know what was happening.”
She had no idea that it was the beginning stages of labor, Convissar said.
The next morning, he said, her mother and stepfather went to work, and she stayed home alone. She spent much of the day on the couch, he said, and “she felt very uncomfortable.”
“Then it was relatively quick,” Convissar said. “She went to the bathroom, and the baby started being born.”
The baby girl came as a total surprise to Zebrun, according to Convissar. “She was just stunned by this,” he said.
She had enough sense to cut the umbilical cord with a pair of scissors, he said, and she then cleaned the baby up.
Zebrun took a pair of shorts from a doll and put them on the infant, according to Convissar. She then swaddled her in a blanket and was planning on calling 911 when she said the baby stopped breathing, the lawyer said.
“She believed that –whether it’s true or not — but in terms of what she saw, she believes it was not breathing,” Convissar said. “It’s what she believes. I don’t know what an autopsy will show.”
She told her lawyer she did not smother or strangle the baby.
Had headed for hospital
Zebrun said she put the baby, still wrapped in the blanket, into a shoe box, and she then got into her car and planned to take the body to Mercy Hospital in South Buffalo. “She was intending to go to Mercy Hospital and cut through the Botanical Gardens and made a very bad decision,” Convissar said.
She put the shoe box into a garbage tote near the gardens, the lawyer said. A man looking for empty cans found it at midday Friday, setting off a round-the-clock search by police for the baby’s mother.
“The choices that she made were wrong,” Convissar said. “She knows it now. But this was not malevolent. It wasn’t evil. . . . It was paralysis out of panic.”
Zebrun told Convissar that she truly did not believe she was pregnant.
She had apparently missed a period and suspected she might be pregnant but then had been spotting over the next several months, Convissar said.
“She did say she put the thought [of being pregnant] out of her mind and buried it away,” Convissar said.
It was not uncommon for her to gain some weight, and lose it, so when she grew a size larger, she didn’t think much of it, he said.
“Her mother had even asked her if she’s gaining weight, and she said, ‘Yeah, I have been,’ ” Convissar said.
Neil S. Kaye, a forensic psychiatrist from Delaware who has testified in more than 100 neonaticide cases, said it’s not uncommon for girls and women to not realize they’re pregnant.
“Some truly don’t know they’re pregnant,” Kaye said. “That seems amazing to people, but the fact is: We have girls and women literally every day who show up in our ERs with stomach aches and give birth hours later and say they had no idea they were pregnant.”
A question of denial
Kaye said that often there is an element of denial involved, too. “In many of these cases,” he said, “the girls will actually continue to menstruate or have spotting and they’ll interpret that as a period and they look for other things to convince them that they’re not pregnant.”
Zebrun’s relatives said Wednesday they believe that Zebrun was unaware of her pregnancy, or else was in a complete state of denial.
“She was in denial or didn’t know she was pregnant,” said her grandmother, Dorothy Colern.
Andrea Haxton, Zebrun’s aunt, held up a small/medium-sized patent leather red belt that she said her niece had worn to the grandmother’s house a few weeks ago as proof that she did not look any different than “she always did.”
“Bad things happen to good people. I believe Alicia panicked and was not in her right mind when the tragedy unfortunately took place,” said Haxton, Lackawanna’s First Ward councilwoman.
The relatives described Zebrun as a shy young woman who had never been in trouble with the law before.
A second-year student at Erie Community College’s culinary arts program, she had aspirations of becoming a pastry chef. She also worked 25 hours a week at a Lackawanna pizzeria.
“All she did was work at a pizzeria and go to school,” said Colern, 78.
It was her work at the pizzeria that led homicide detectives to Zebrun. The shoe box in which she had placed her baby had contained special shoes favored by fast-food workers that can only be purchased online.
Investigators traced her order to her address on Linden Avenue in Lackawanna.
Nikki Masocco, Zebrun’s 21-year-old cousin, said Zebrun has been timid all her life. “When we went to Cedar Point amusement park as little kids, Alicia wouldn’t go on any rides; she just stuck by my dad,” Masocco said.
‘If we’d only known’
In June, Zebrun had traveled to Southern California for a two-week visit with her sister, Angela, whose husband, a Marine, is serving in Iraq.
“She didn’t know. I know she didn’t. She would have confided in me. I’m her older sister,” said Angela, 22. “I couldn’t even imagine what was going on in her head.”
When asked about the deceased infant’s father, the older sister said that Zebrun had been seeing someone several months ago but that in recent months, they had stopped dating.
Convissar declined to comment on the infant’s father but said the young man had no clue she was pregnant.
In grappling with the death of a great-granddaughter she never met, Colern said she and other family members want to start a community movement to help struggling mothers and other young people so that they do not have to feel alone.
“Everyone would have given that baby girl a home and helped Alicia, if we’d only known,” Colern said, breaking down in tears.
Haxton said she plans to go to area schools to find out if there is any ongoing classroom instruction about a 2000 state law that allows mothers and guardians of newborns up to 5 days old to anonymously leave the infant in a safe haven without facing legal consequences.
In Buffalo on Wednesday, Mayor Byron W. Brown announced an expansion of the city’s “Safe Place” program, establishing City Hall and all of the city’s firehouses and police districts as places where teenagers in distress can seek help from adults.
“If there are young people in crisis, if there are young people in distress,” Brown said in a news conference, “we want them to know there are safe places where they can go and find help.”
The death of Zebrun’s baby, Brown said, is “an event we don’t want to see duplicated in Buffalo or anywhere else in Western New York.”
mbecker@buffnews.com and lmichel@buffnews.com
