Breast Reduction Defense Used in Baby Starving Death Case

A young woman accused of starving to death her newborn was a loving mother who didn’t realize her surgically reduced breasts lacked adequate nourishment, her lawyer said.

Prosecutors charge Tabitha Walrond deliberately starved her 2-month-old baby to get back at the boy’s father, who had taken another girlfriend. The defense disagreed.

“This is a tragedy, from the moment this child died to this day,” said Walrond’s lawyer, Susan V. Tipograph, on Thursday. If ignorance were a crime, “we’d need a much larger courtroom,” she said.

Walrond, 21, on trial for manslaughter, was at risk for breast-feeding failure because of the reduction operation she’d had when she was 15, but doctors didn’t warn her about the danger, Tipograph has said.

The baby weighed barely 5 pounds when he died in August 1997, nearly 3 pounds less than his birth weight.

The boyfriend, Keenan Purrell, testified that Walrond exploded when he informed her that he had a new girlfriend and that she was pregnant.

The 21-year-old former security guard said he assured Walrond he would help her with the baby, although he had spoken with her rarely during her pregnancy.

“My son was beautiful to me, but he was skinny,” he testified Thursday.