Documents reveal more details in baby-throwing case

Her story came out through tears.

It was May 5, and Jasmine Bedwell had been crying since the early morning. That's when, investigators say, her ex-boyfriend beat and choked her, threw her 3-month-old baby on the concrete floor, then drove off with the infant before throwing the baby onto Interstate 275.

Deputies had already told her that her baby, Emanuel Wesley Murray, was dead. Now, between sobs at St. Joseph's Hospital emergency room, Bedwell was telling them what happened.

The incident began at about 3 a.m., Bedwell told Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office deputies. Her statements were contained in nearly 500 pages of documents released Tuesday in the case against her ex-boyfriend, Richard McTear Jr.

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 had called her the evening before and told her he was going to break into her apartment and kill her and the baby, she said. McTear was not the baby's father.

She went to a friend's house that night, but about 3 a.m., she decided she needed to go home because she had school that day.

Waiting for her inside the home, she said, was McTear. She wasn't sure how he had gotten into her apartment.

Bedwell said McTear punched her. Emanuel was asleep in a car seat at the time, and McTear told her "he gonna get it too," she said.

He told her he was upset about her relationship with another man and poured a can of soda in her baby's face and spit on him, she said. Then he started throwing around the car seat with the baby in it, she said.

"He slung him in the kitchen first and then he slung him into the living room on the floor," Bedwell said. The baby flew out of the car seat after one of the tosses, she said.

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.

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."

Shortly after the attack, the child was found face down on the side of Interstate 275, his body cold to the touch and his skull fractured. Emanuel died from blunt impact to his head, which caused skull fractures, according to medical examiner reports.

Bedwell was at the hospital when a deputy told her her child had been found and was dead.

Bedwell wept and said, "No, not my baby! He killed my baby!"

McTear, 21, is charged with first-degree murder. He remains without bail in Orient Road Jail.