Mother Convicted of Killing Infant Son With Her Car

An Orange County jury convicted Sheryl Lynn Massip of second-degree murder Thursday, rejecting the Anaheim housewife’s claim that she was suffering from postpartum psychosis when she ran over her 6-week-old son with the family car last year.

Massip, 24, was the first murder defendant in Southern California to use postpartum psychosis as a defense, claiming she was temporarily insane at the time of the killing. She testified that she heard voices telling her to “put him (her child) out of his misery.”

Postpartum psychosis, still largely unexplored by medical and legal experts in this country, is a rare disorder thought to cause severe emotional changes and anxiety in some new mothers. It has been employed as a defense with mixed verdicts by about 15 other women in the United States in the last several years, scholars say.

The facts of the Massip case went essentially undisputed throughout the eight-week trial.

Massip admitted to first trying to throw her son, Michael, into oncoming traffic on the morning of April 29, 1987, then hitting him on the head with a blunt instrument and finally running over the child with the family Volvo.

She then dumped the body in a neighborhood trash can and, hysterical, told police that the child had been kidnaped by a mystery woman with red hair and a gun.

Only when confronted hours later by her suspicious husband, Alfredo Massip, did Sheryl Massip confess to the killing.

Prosecutors asserted that the young mother killed the child knowingly and deliberately out of frustration with the colicky child’s constant crying and her own failing marriage.

“The verdict was just and fair based on the evidence,” prosecutor Tom Borris said. “She killed her kid, and that’s what the jury found.”

Wept at Verdict

The verdict followed seven days of deliberation by the jury in Santa Ana Superior Court. Massip wept silently as the guilty verdict was read. Leaving the courthouse, Massip cried uncontrollably and collapsed into the arms of her father, Ed De Lano of Rowland Heights.

“I’m sorry that (the jury) didn’t understand,” Massip said in an interview minutes later. “Something wasn’t right with me (when she ran over her son), and I was trying to tell them that. But they didn’t hear me out.”

Massip faces a maximum prison term of 16 years to life. She is scheduled to be sentenced Dec. 23 by Judge Robert R. Fitzgerald.

Jury foreman Ray Seymour of Irvine called the decision to convict Massip “the hardest any one of us has ever had to make.” He and other jurors refused to answer any questions on their deliberations as they left the courthouse. Several appeared shaken, with tears in their eyes.

Defense attorney Milton C. Grimes, shaking his head in disbelief after the verdict, said: “I never could have imagined this. This is the worst, the most difficult to accept, because I believe the evidence was clear.”

Grimes offered medical testimony and accounts from people close to Massip in his insanity defense.

Untried Defense

The defense attorney, acknowledging the relatively untried nature of the postpartum psychosis defense, said he believed the jury might return a verdict of manslaughter against Massip. But of the second-degree murder verdict reached by the jury, Grimes said, “I just don’t know what they were thinking about.”