20-Year-Old Admits She Killed Newborn at Prom

In an emotionless and childlike voice, a young woman described Thursday how she gave birth in a bathroom at her senior prom last year, fished the baby out of the toilet, wrapped him in plastic bags and dumped him into the trash.

As her parents looked on, 20-year-old Melissa Drexler pleaded guilty to aggravated manslaughter in the boy’s death, sparing herself a murder trial and a possible life sentence.

She could get up to 15 years in prison at sentencing Oct. 29 and could be out in as little as three years with good behavior.

“The baby was born alive,” Drexler told the judge, reading from a handwritten statement. “I was aware of what I was doing when I placed the baby in the bag, and I was further aware that what I did would most certainly result in the death of the baby.”

After giving birth at the catering hall on June 6, 1997, Drexler washed up and returned to the dance floor with her date.

Maintenance workers who were called to clean up blood on the bathroom floor discovered the dead baby.

“I knew I was pregnant,” Drexler said. “I concealed the pregnancy from everyone. On the morning of the prom, my water broke.”

She made no apology and offered no explanation.

Another New Jersey teen who killed her newborn, Amy Grossberg, and her boyfriend, Brian Peterson, pleaded guilty last month in Delaware to manslaughter for killing their son in a motel room there and tossing the body in a trash bin. Grossberg got 2 1/2 years; Peterson received two.

Drexler “felt that being pregnant was a very serious problem, something she was ashamed of and wanted to hide,” prosecutor John Kaye said after the hearing. “She isolated herself. She did not tell her parents. She kept this a secret from her boyfriend. She just denied it.”

Her attorney, Steven Secare, said she appeared emotionless because she was nervous.

Drexler knows “it’s something she’ll have to live with for the rest of her life,” he said.