The 22-year-old Florida mother accused of shaking her baby to death, after the infant’s crying interrupted the mother’s Facebook time on the Farmville game, has pled guilty to Second-Degree Murder and now faces a lifetime of up to 50 years in prison.
Alexandra Tobias allegedly shook her 3-month-old son to death--an event possibly linked to postpartum depression. The baby-shaking incident follows Tobias’ discovery of her own deceased mother.
Infant Dylan Lee Edmondson died in January, after being shaken to death by frustrated and overwhelmed mother Alexandra Tobias. Police say that the baby’s mother admits she was angry because the baby would not stop crying while she was playing the Farmville game on Facebook—resulting in the infant’s murder.
The mother placed a 911 call: "He's [the baby’s] only 14 weeks old; he's not breathing," Alexandra Tobias frantically tells a 911 operator. Tobias initially lied to police who arrived on scene at the time of the baby’s death, telling police officers that a dog had knocked her baby off of a couch and that the infant had subsequently hit his head and stopped breathing.
Later, the young mother admitted to having shaken her baby violently after the 3-month-old would not stop crying--the infant’s crying having interrupted the Farmville game app that she was then playing on social networking site Facebook.
Tobias broke down while in police custody, telling a cellmate that Tobias had confessed to killing her own baby in January. "I asked her 'What you here for?'” the cellmate testified to police, “and she [Tobias] said, 'Murder,'" says Lois Hay. "I said, 'Murder? Who, who did you murder?' She [Alexandra Tobias] said, 'I my murdered my baby, my own baby.' And I was, like, 'Why did you do that?' She [Tobias] said she shook her baby and during the shaking of the baby, the baby hit his head on the computer."
The 22-year-old mother, Alexandra Tobias, had recently discovered her own mother dead—before the shaking of her own baby while playing Farmville. It’s not known whether postpartum depression, or trauma from finding her own mom deceased, were large factors in the murder of her own son. In recorded telephone calls to family members—recordings of which Tobias was unaware at the time—the 22-year-old refers to the recent death of her mother as affecting her psychological state.
"Ever since I found my mother dead, I just haven't been the same," Tobias had told family by phone.
Alexandra Tobias will be sentenced up to 25-50 years in prison, the mother expected to spend most—if not all—of her remaining life behind bars after the death of her son.