He stumbled across an infant boy who had frozen to death, with his umbilical cord still attached, Virginia officials said.
Twenty years later, the baby’s mother has been sentenced to serve 32 years in prison.
The Chesapeake District Attorney’s Office announced the sentence April 5 after saying DNA evidence connected 46-year-old Melissa Chrisman of Portsmouth, Virginia, to the case and indicated she was the child’s mother.
McClatchy News reached out to Chrisman’s attorney April 8 but did not immediately receive a response.
“This newborn baby is perhaps the most innocent and completely helpless victim Chesapeake has ever seen,” Matt Hamel, the Commonwealth’s Attorney for the City of Chesapeake, said in the release.
The Chesapeake community came to know the child not just as another John Doe but as Baby Daniel in the decades the cold case was open.
“The community really rallied around this investigation, I think just because it is a child, as innocent as he was, to be left behind in the woods,” detective James Thomas with the Chesapeake Police Department said in 2019. “And him not being identified or with no name is what led the investigators and citizens to name him Baby Daniel.”
A local business donated a bench to sit in the spot where Baby Daniel was found, and a cemetery donated a grave marker for his burial, according to Thomas.
The case began Jan. 17, 2003, when 11-year-old Rafael Cabrera was cutting through the woods of a local park to hang out with his friends.
That’s when he saw something blue sticking out of the snow, he recounted in 2019. When he started digging, he found a pile of clothing, and underneath all of it, a newborn child.
“When I pulled back the last blanket is when I found Baby Daniel,” he said. “I was by myself, so of course I got scared.”
He ran through the woods until he flagged down a car, and then investigators reported to the scene to find Baby Daniel. The child was wearing an oversized diaper and still had his umbilical cord attached, so he had been born recently, investigators said.
The medical examiner determined the baby died of hypothermia, according to the attorney’s office.
For years, investigators couldn’t identify the child, and the case eventually went cold.
The case stayed with Cabrera over the years, but he reached out to the cold case detective handling the case as he and his wife were expecting their first child, he said.
“That shouldn’t happen to anybody,” he said. “No one deserves that.”
In 2019, Chesapeake Detective Vernon Ryder began working on the case again and re-examined forensic evidence. DNA led them to Chrisman, who would have been 24 at the time she had the child, records show.
She initially “denied any involvement until confronted with the DNA evidence,” according to the attorney’s office. “She then admitted to being the mother of the baby left in the woods to die.”
Chrisman was arrested in January 2020, nearly 17 years after investigators said her child froze to death in the woods, case records show.
She pleaded guilty to a first-degree murder charge in October 2023 and was sentenced to 55 years in prison, with 23 years suspended, leaving her with 32 years to serve.
“Instead of caring for her baby, this defendant betrayed her obligation and left her baby in the snow-covered woods to die,” Hamel said. “She then evaded detection for nearly 20 years.”
Chesapeake is near the southeast coast of Virginia, about a 25-mile drive southwest of Virginia Beach.
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