Trial Begins for Woman Who Cut Baby from Womb | Print | E-mail
Written by Selwyn Duke
Wednesday, 13 January 2010 12:06
It sounds like a dark story from the days of ancient pagan rituals: A person tears open a woman’s womb while she’s still alive and takes her baby from it. I wrote about such a crime in August of last year, but, tragically, it was no isolated event. And now a different case of this kind is coming to trial, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Forty-year-old Andrea Curry-Demus of Wilkinsburg, a Pittsburgh suburb, wanted a baby badly. Very badly, it seems. So her hopes must have been buttressed when a urine test showed that she might be pregnant — yet a subsequent blood test would dash those hopes. This is when Curry-Demus put a deadly plan into action, one that would leave a woman dead and a baby motherless.

She began by trying to convince others she was pregnant, going so far as to put her name on an ultrasound image and give it to her mother. The Associated Press reported on what transpired next, writing:

She met and befriended Kia Johnson, 18, of McKeesport, at the Allegheny County Jail, in July 2008. Johnson was visiting her unborn son's father and Curry-Demus was visiting her husband. Curry-Demus lured Johnson to her apartment to steal the baby, [prosecutor Mark] Tranquilli said.

Johnson's body — bound with duct tape and wrapped in plastic wrap and a comforter — was found stuffed behind a headboard. The baby, Terrell Kian Johnson, survived and is living with relatives.

As a ruse, Curry-Demus then showed up at a local hospital and said she had given birth in her bathroom. But after medical tests showed that she had not given birth, hospital personnel alerted the police. Covering the event in 2008, CNN reported what happened next, writing, “According to a criminal complaint, Curry-Demus told Detective Rich Grande that she purchased the baby from a woman named Tina for $1,000. Curry-Demus told Grande she had suffered a miscarriage in June and ‘did not want her mother to get upset.’â€