AMY GROSSBERG WENT INTO labor just after midnight. She was in her freshman dorm room at the University of Delaware, in pain and terrified. She couldn't go to the hospital. Only 18, she had spent the last nine months hiding her pregnancy from her well-to-do parents, perhaps afraid to shatter their suburb- perfect image of their lovely, artistic daughter. So she called the baby's father, Brian Peterson Jr., also 18, at his college in Gettysburg, Pa. He arrived three hours later in his black Toyota Celica, took her to a nearby Comfort Inn motel and paid $52 for Room 220. What happened next is equal parts mystery and tragedy. Police say a healthy baby boy--20 inches long; 6 pounds, 2 ounces--was born toward morning. Brian told the authorities that he put the child in a plastic bag and deposited him in the motel Dumpster. The students returned to their colleges--stopping at a carwash, perhaps to clean up the Celica's interior--and hoped that their gilded, carefree lives would go on as if nothing had happened. But something had. The next day, police say, they found the infant--shaken to death and with his skull and brain crushed. Amy and Brian were charged with murder. If they're convicted, the Delaware attorney general says she will ask for the death penalty.
Such grisly crimes aren't entirely uncommon. Last week a cleaning woman at a movie theater in New York's Long Island found an hours-old boy asphyxiated in a toilet. FBI statistics show that 207 children younger than a week were murdered in 1994, a 92 percent increase since 1973. There is a pattern to these deaths. The parents are usually young and poor; the mother frequently acts alone. But Grossberg and Peterson don't fit the profile, which is one reason their families--and suburban parents around the country--are so shaken. Both Grossberg and Peterson come from wealthy, stable homes. Friends describe them as ""good'' kids. They had access to abortion clinics, adoption agencies and counseling to handle an unwanted child. ""They were two wealthy kids who had so many options in life,'' Constantine Maroulis, a Grossberg family friend, told NEWSWEEK. Seeking out an abortion, or putting the baby up for adoption, perhaps seemed too risky to the teens: their families could somehow find out. The fear that this child would cost Grossberg and Peterson their privileged lives--and disappoint the people who had made their comfortable worlds possible--may have led the too-young parents into a spiral of fatal decisions.
