DYLAN LEE EDMONDSON - 3 months - Jacksonville FL

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. -- A Jacksonville mother was charged with murder after police said she shook her baby boy so badly he died.On
Tuesday morning, rescuers rushed 21-year-old Alexandra Tobias's
3-month-old son Dylan to a hospital. Police said the boy had a head
injury and a broken leg.Police later interviewed Tobias and said
she admitted to shaking the baby because he was crying while she played
a game on Facebook. Police said Tobias shook the baby three times, and
the baby's head could have hit the computer.According to police,
Tobias went outside to smoke a cigarette, and while she was out, the
family dog knocked the boy off the couch.Investigators said when
she came back in, the boy cried again and police said she admitted to
shaking the boy again, causing him to stop breathing.
Police
first arrested Tobias on Tuesday for aggravated child abuse. After her
son died Wednesday, they added the charge of murder.The baby's
father said Tobias called him initially after the baby was injured, and
he said he wasn't as angry or sad as he was in shock over what happened."I
think what sparked her was that the baby was crying," Jacksonville
Sheriff's Office Lt. Larry Schmitt said. "I don't think it mattered
what she was doing, but it was enough to kind of put her over the edge,
and she started shaking the baby, caused severe head trauma to the
child."

Evidence prosecutors plan to use in the trial of a young woman charged
in the death of her own baby includes the woman's own statements that
she killed the child, according to court documents.Alexandra Tobias, 22,
is accused of shaking her 3-month-old son to death in January."He's only 14 weeks old;
he's not breathing," Alexandra Tobias frantically told a 911 operator.Shortly
after that 911 call was made, Tobias told investigators a dog knocked
her child off a couch, he hit his head and he stopped breathing. Court
documents show that Tobias later admitted to shaking her baby violently
because the 3-month-old would not stop crying while she was playing a
game on Facebook.Prosecutors said they also have
a statement from a cellmate who says Tobias confessed to her."I
asked her 'What you here for?' and she said, 'Murder,'" inmate Lois Hay
said. "I said, 'Murder? Who who did you murder?' She said, 'I my
murdered my baby, my own baby.' And I was, like, 'Why did you do that?'
She said she shook her baby and during the shaking of the baby, the baby
hit his head on the computer."In recorded telephone calls Tobias
made to family members, she said the recent death of her mother
affected her psychological state, and it may have been a contributing
factors to her aggression on the night of her son's death.
"Ever since I found my mother dead, I just haven't been the same," Tobias said.
Tobias is being held on charges including aggravated child abuse and murder.
Pretrial in her case is scheduled for November.

Alexandra Tobias, the young Jacksonville mother charged with killing
her 3-month-old son for crying while she played a Facebook video game,
has been sentenced to 50 years in prison.
"He who is the most defenseless among us was murdered by his own
mommy. And why? Because he was crying during a game of FishVille or
FarmVille or whatever was going on during Facebooking time that day,"
Circuit Judge Adrian G. Soud said.
Tobias dropped her defensive stance when she pleaded guilty to
second-degree murder in baby Dylan Lee Edmondson's death last October, a
plea that went viral as popular websites like Gawker and The Daily
Beast picked up the story and CNN's Nancy Grace show picked apart the
arrest for nearly an hour.
The shocking part came as prosecutors described Tobias' hobby for
playing interactive games like FarmVille and FishVille on Facebook -
even as she killed her child.
Tobias told the judge that she was suffering from postpartum
depression but wants to go back to the good person she was before the
killing.
"I hate myself for what I did but not for who I am," Tobias said.
It was an emotional hearing in which Tobias' friends and family
described her as a fun-loving, albeit somewhat mischievous, child who
grew into a beautiful woman and responsible mother.
Life dealt her some tough knocks. She'd found her mother dead in
2008. She told a psychologist she'd been raped at a younger age. Her
plans to go to college after graduating from Wolfson High School were
set back when she got pregnant. She and the baby's father were in an
on-again, off-again relationship that became so intense both of them
were arrested for domestic violence several weeks before the baby's
death.
Still, nobody close to Tobias could believe she‘d ever take her frustrations out on the baby.
There was a point when it seemed Tobias thought she'd beat the charges.
The 22-year-old Jacksonville mother was telling mixed stories to the police, doctors, Duval County jail inmates and even family.
Before Tuesday's hearing, the Times-Union obtained case depositions
and even letters in Tobias' handwriting that show how the young mother
tried to look past her son's death and socialize herself in jail as if
she'd be just a temporary occupant.
"She laughs and -- and she -- she colors. I mean, she's got her
coloring pencils and they sit around and they just -- you know, it's
like it -- they're in a -- a home for girls, you know. It's fun time,
and it's not," said Lois Hay, a fellow inmate who was deposed in the
case by Assistant State Attorney Rich Mantei last March.
Hay said Tobias' story shocked the cellblock. At one point, she told
inmates that she shook the baby and smashed his head off of her computer
monitor. But she also would change the story to blame the abuse on her
boyfriend, his mother and her dog.
"I had a son named Dylan Lee but he passed away on January 20, 2010!"
reads a letter Tobias wrote to a male inmate she was trying to court
romantically. Prosecutors intercepted it. "They are trying to charge me
with my son's death and child abuse. Now I don't expect you to
understand but I can't really talk about it but I can tell you I'm in
here for the wrong reasons."
She wasn't the only one in disbelief.
"She was a young mother. She was under a lot of stress, but I don't
see her doing anything malicious. She knows better," Tobias's sister,
Elizabeth, told Mantei in a deposition last February.
Elizabeth Tobias showed Soud pictures of Tobias and pleaded for mercy during Tuesday's hearing.
The morning of Edmondson's death, Tobias sent text messages to the
baby's father, Earl Edmondson, that she didn't sleep well and her back
was killing her.
Shortly after that exchange, Tobias called 911 to report her son had
stopped breathing. She's hysterical in the recording as she tries to
collect herself to follow the dispatcher's instructions on
mouth-to-mouth and chest compressions as the rescue squad is en route.
The medical examiner determined Edmondson died of abusive head trauma and deemed the death a homicide.
"While this defendant may not be a monster, she committed a monstrous act," Mantei argued to Soud.
According to testimony, Tobias called a neighbor from the hospital,
asking him to go into her house and hide all of her marijuana before the
police acted on a search warrant.
Prosecutors zeroed in on Tobias' Facebook page in the investigation.
Screen captures that have become part of the case file show Tobias used
the social networking site to broadcast much of her life.
Between posts about hungry fish and wandering animals on the
website's FishVille and Farmville games, Tobias kept a profile for her
three-month-old. New Year's Day postings showed he was 12 pounds and 22
inches tall.
She also talked about having gall bladder surgery. She labeled
herself a Christian and a Republican and gave no specific reasons for
being a fan of things like television's One Tree Hill and Hollywood
starlet Megan Fox.
The day before she'd killed her son, Tobias took a mental disorder
quiz that displayed for all of her 117 Facebook friends that she was
bipolar.
The quiz results, shown in the website's Quiz Planet post, carried a
sophomoric tone: "Way to go you crazy person. You are too much for any
one person to handle, including yourself."
A month before she killed her son, detectives say Tobias joined a Facebook advocacy group against baby-shaking.
Psychologist Stephen Bloomfield testified Tuesday that Tobias
suffered from depression and postpartum depression. He said it's partly
because of her upbringing under a mother who was diagnosed as bipolar
and who grappled with drug problems.
"She doesn't seem sad and she doesn't seem happy," Bloomfield said.
Bloomfield said Tobias took Xanax, without a prescription, the
morning of the baby's death. He explained that the anti-anxiety drug can
exaggerate downward mood swings for depressives.
However, Bloomfield said Tobias tried to tell him that she
blacked-out what happened when her son died. He said he couldn't believe
that because she did not have a history of blackouts.
Then prosecutors caught Tobias in a recorded phone call from the jail
claiming that she was trying to lie to Bloomfield to cover up her own
confession in the case.
Tobias' case may be rare, but it's not totally unique. Last month, a
Colorado mother, Shannon Johnson, was charged when her 13-month-old son
drowned in a bathtub while authorities say she zoned out to the game
Café World on Facebook.
The Tobias case became a talking point in the ongoing debate over
computer games' influence over people's actions. Stephen Johnson, a
blogger on the G4tv gaming network, had this to say shortly after Tobias
pleaded guilty:
"Farmville will get a well-deserved pass, but I'll bet if this crime
was committed by a man, and he had been playing Slaughterhouse, the
media narrative would be very, very different."
Read more at Jacksonville.com: http://jacksonville.com/news/crime/2011-02-01/story/jacksonville-mother-who-admitted-killing-child-during-farmville-game#ixzz1CkVd1han