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She took a DNA test for fun. Police used it to charge her grandmother with murder in a cold case

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https://www.yahoo.com/news/jay-zs-response-sexual-assault-192520608.html

It was the middle of Jenna Gerwatowski’s workday at the local flower shop 
in Newberry, Michigan, when she got a call from an unknown number.

The now 23-year-old doesn’t usually answer unknown calls, but says she 
decided to pick this one up in May 2022.

To her surprise, it was a detective from the Michigan state police.

“He was like, ‘Have you heard of the Baby Garnet case?’” Jenna told CNN.

Jenna had heard of it. In 1997, a deceased infant was found in a 
campground pit toilet at the Garnet Lake Campground – right where Jenna 
grew up. Investigators couldn’t find any leads on the identity of the baby 
or anyone who witnessed a person abandoning an infant, according to a news 
release from the Michigan attorney general’s office. The case went cold, 
and the “Baby Garnet” case became a known murder mystery in Jenna’s small 
town for decades.

“Your DNA was a match,” Jenna says the detective on the phone told her. 
She was related to the dead infant from 1997.

Jenna was in shock. The detective sounded sure, Jenna said, but she 
wondered how he had even obtained her DNA.

About six months earlier, her friend had gotten a FamilyTreeDNA test for 
Christmas and Jenna decided to order her own. DNA from other Baby Garnet 
relatives led detectives to Jenna’s FamilyTreeDNA kit, according to court 
documents.

The detective said a woman from Identifinders International, a genetic 
genealogy investigation firm, would call her about her DNA to help with 
identifying closer relatives, according to Jenna.

According to court documents, detectives reopened the cold case in 2017 
and then worked with a forensics company to extract DNA from Baby Garnet’s 
partial femur, before sending the results to Identifinders International.

Jenna explained the situation to her mother when she got home from work.

“It was just crazy,” Jenna said. “We were both sitting there like, I don’t 
even know who (the mother or father) could’ve been. We were both so 
confused and we’re like, it’s got to be somebody that we don’t know, you 
know, like a distant cousin or something.”

Jenna said her mother, Kara Gerwatowski, started to wonder whether the 
detective call was a scam.

Jenna’s grandfather had just been scammed by someone claiming to be a 
detective, so Kara told Jenna to be cautious about giving out personal 
information or passwords.

Misty Gillis, then a senior forensic genealogist and cold case liaison 
from Identifinders International, called Jenna that night, according to 
Jenna and court documents filed later in the case.

Jenna claims Gillis requested her FamilyTreeDNA password to be able to 
upload her DNA into a separate database. Jenna was concerned it was a 
scammer and refused to cooperate, according to court documents.

“I hung up the phone on her, not even thinking twice about it. And we went 
about our day. I was like, how weird. What a weird thing to scam people 
about,” Jenna said. “I wholeheartedly did not think that it was real.”

One week later, Jenna was working at the flower shop when she got a 
distressed call from her mother.

“She was like, ‘I really need you to come home. … It’s an emergency. Like, 
just please come as soon as you can,’” Jenna said.

Jenna rushed home thinking someone died. Her cousin was sitting with her 
mom at their round wooden kitchen table. Police had contacted her cousin, 
who works as a victim’s advocate in the county prosecutor’s office, to 
explain the Baby Garnet situation to Jenna. It turned out it wasn’t a 
scam.

“My mom had tears in her eyes,” she said. Jenna’s cousin had “just pure 
shock on her face. … You could hear a pin drop in there.”

Even though Jenna knew she had nothing to do with the Baby Garnet case, 
she was terrified police would think she was trying to hide something 
because of her refusal to speak with Gillis. She immediately called her.

An analysis of Jenna’s DNA kit showed she was the half-niece to Baby 
Garnet, according to court records.

On June 1, 2022, detectives spoke with her mother, Kara, who agreed to 
provide her DNA. Kara was the half-sister of Baby Garnet, according to 
court records.

“I feel like that is when, like, all of the puzzle pieces kind of started 
falling together for her,” Jenna said. “And she told detectives that, if 
it’s going to be anybody, it would be (her) mother.”

Kara, now 42, had not spoken with her mother, Nancy Gerwatowski, since she 
was 18 because they had a bad relationship, and Jenna had never met her 
grandmother. Regardless, both were shocked Nancy, who was living in 
Wyoming when police questioned her, would be the one behind their town 
mystery.

“I had grown up knowing about the case my whole life and then come to find 
out it was my grandma that did it?” Jenna said.

The Michigan attorney general’s office alleges Nancy “delivered the 
newborn alone at her Newberry home, during which Baby Garnet died due to 
asphyxiation, and that this death could have been prevented by medical 
intervention (Nancy) Gerwatowski did not seek.”

However, in a court filing, Nancy’s defense argues she unexpectedly gave 
birth while in the bathtub and the fetus “became trapped inside her birth 
canal.” She “attempted to pull the fetus out of her own body,” the filing 
says, but couldn’t deliver the fetus and lost consciousness “at some point 
in the delivery.” When she was finally able to deliver the fetus, it was 
dead, the filing says.

Her defense argues that Nancy, like the average person in the county in 
1997, did not have access to a telephone or cell line, so she couldn’t 
call 911. While she concedes in her legal filings she placed the stillborn 
fetus in a bag and left the remains at the campground, her defense 
attorneys argue she had been in shock after having had no pain medication 
during the traumatic birth.

Nancy is charged with one count each of open murder, involuntary 
manslaughter, and concealing the death of an individual. Open murder 
carries a potential life sentence.

In a hearing on Thursday, Nancy’s defense argued that the case against her 
should be dropped in its entirety because the state cannot prove the baby 
was born alive. If the court allows the case to proceed, the defense 
argued, Nancy’s statements during police interrogation should be excluded 
because she was denied her right to counsel — a contention the state 
disputed. If the court does allow her statements to be a part of the 
trial, Nancy’s lawyers want her comments about considering an abortion and 
not seeking out prenatal care to be excluded, while the state argued the 
comments are relevant to possible motive.

Judge Brian D. Rahilly said he hopes to reach a decision on whether or not 
to drop the charges by next week or around the end of the year at the 
latest.

“It was a very hard time … very traumatizing and very nerve-wracking,” 
said Jenna. “I’ve never met this woman, so it was hard for me to even 
grasp that concept, but even harder for my mom because that was her 
mother.”


-- 
November 5, 2024 - Congratulations President Donald Trump.  We look 
forward to America being great again.

The disease known as Kamala Harris has been effectively treated and 
eradicated.

We live in a time where intelligent people are being silenced so that 
stupid people won't be offended.

Durham Report: The FBI has an integrity problem.  It has none.

Thank you for cleaning up the disaster of the 2008-2017 Obama / Biden 
fiasco, President Trump.  

Under Barack Obama's leadership, the United States of America became the 
The World According To Garp.  Obama sold out heterosexuals for Hollywood 
queer liberal democrat donors.

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She took a DNA test for fun. Police used it to charge her grandmother with murder in a cold case "Leroy N. Soetoro" <democrat-insurrection@mail.house.gov> - 2024-12-19 19:30 +0000

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