Cassidy Goodison a 14 year old girl recently showed a Florida courtroom how she went about secretly giving birth to a baby using scissors in the family bathroom and how she then throttled it with her bare hands before hiding it in a shoe box.
Astonished onlookers heard testimony pursuant to the young girl being charged with first degree murder as an adult as they watched the video of the scene reenacted in the family bathroom. In place of her child, investigators had asked that she use a Santa Claus doll.
Says Goodison during the video clip: ‘Its eyes weren’t open but I felt to see if it was breathing or not, and (it was breathing) so I put my hands around its throat to make it stop breathing.’
The case has brought furore to her community as questions are being asked as to why the girl never came clean about her situation and how for that matter the child was able to keep her pregnancy a secret from her family?
According to the UK’s dailymail, Goodison went into labor in her home in Greenbrier Village, Florida on September 19 and instead of calling for help, disguised her screams of pain by running the tap and gripping a towel between her teeth as she sat on the toilet.
When asked by police how hard she squeezed, the girl said: ‘Enough for it to stop breathing.’
Discovery of the baby’s corpse only came about after Cassidy Goodison’s mother came across a foul smell whilst cleaning her daughter’s room. Of course this too raises the question if Cassidy Goodson really wanted to hide all evidence of her pregnancy why did she leave the child in the shoe box for so long, or did she in some way want to be found out, as even she must have realized that by now her parents would notice a rancid smell coming from her room.
It is understood during Casssidy Goodison’s pregnancy the girl had gone to great lengths to disguise the fact that she was pregnant, as she resorted to wearing baggy clothing. At one stage her mother grew suspicious and had her daughter take two home pregnancy tests, albeit in the privacy of her bathroom, which both came out negative.
After having giving birth in the family bathroom, Cassidy Goodson’t mother noticed blood in the toilet and knowing that her daughter had just used it insisted on taking her daughter to Lakeland Regional Medical center where she would then tell medical workers she had had a miscarriage as noticed by the self inflected scissor lacerations on her vagina wall. This led to Cassidy Goodson falsely confessing that she had indeed had a miscarriage at home and that she had flushed the foetus down the toilet by mistake.
In court Cassidy Goodison related that she hid her pregnancy from her parents for fear that had they known she was pregnant their relationship with her would change, which ironically has been said to indeed be the case.
Reiterated Polk County Public Information officer, Donna Wood to the UK’s dailymail: ‘This is the most perplexing, confusing, disheartening case I’ve ever seen in my 18 years on this job. Everyone has been touched by it.’
This story disturbs me. I can’t fathom how she will be able to cope with this on her conscience.