"Be safe," her friend told her at the door.
Jasmine Bedwell was back in her apartment. She had fled eight hours earlier, afraid her ex-boyfriend Rico would make good on his telephone threats to kill her and her baby.
Now the 17-year-old thought the danger had passed.
Her friend carried 3-month-old Emanuel from the car and set the car seat by Jasmine's couch.
"Call me, call my mama, call any of us if you need us," he said before he left.
Jasmine went inside. She closed the door and locked it. She headed down the short hall toward her living room.
"I told you I would get you," Richard "Rico" McTear said.
He had been in the house, waiting around the corner for Jasmine, like trouble always did.
[...]
McTear appeared in the hallway. This is what Jasmine remembers after that:
He punched and beat her and threw her on the couch.
He broke pictures of the baby.
He grabbed a soda and a jug of water. He stood, gulping the water all at once, then walked to Emanuel's car seat and poured the soda all over the sleeping infant's face.
Emanuel started to wail.
"Rico, stop! Rico stop!" she remembers crying.
McTear picked up Emanuel's car seat and threw it from the living room to the kitchen with the baby still inside, she said. Then, he threw it from the kitchen back to the living room, where Emanuel fell out, screaming.
McTear ordered Jasmine to shut the baby up.
"Get him," she remembers McTear yelling. "Make him shut up before I kill both of y'all. Don't make me go in the room and get my gun."
She bolted for the door. McTear came at her, grabbed the baby from her arms, pushed her away and ran outside, where he tossed Emanuel on the ground.
Emanuel's bottom hit concrete, she said, and his head hit grass.
Jasmine couldn't get to him in time.
She said McTear took off with her baby. She screamed and pounded on doors for help.
She grabbed a neighbor's phone and called 911, she said. She could barely speak, her mouth swollen from the beating.
In the minutes that followed, a television news videographer driving south along Interstate 275 near Fowler Avenue would make a gruesome discovery.
A 3-month-old baby, dead on the highway, flung from a car window.
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