CHESAPEAKE — The photograph entered into evidence Friday showed a newborn baby with a head full of black hair.
The boy’s eyes were closed, but he appeared to be smiling. A large red spot on the tip of his nose indicated frostbite.
The photo was taken at the boy’s autopsy, shortly after his body was found Jan. 17, 2003, in a snow-covered park in Chesapeake. The baby, dressed only in an oversized diaper and wrapped in blankets, was discovered by an 11-year-old boy in Western Branch Park. A medical examiner determined he died from hypothermia. His umbilical cord was still attached.
The boy soon came to be known as “Baby Daniel” by investigators working the case as well as community members who held a public funeral for him and provided a coffin, flowers and headstone.
His mother remained unknown until January 2020, after a new detective assigned to the cold case sent the blankets in which he was found to a state forensic lab. The DNA discovered on one was determined to have come from Melissa Sue Chrisman, a married mother of two who was living in Portsmouth at the time of her arrest.
Chrisman was sentenced Friday to 32 years in prison. It was the maximum she could receive under a deal reached with prosecutors in which she agreed to plead guilty to first-degree murder in exchange for the sentencing cap.
“This child suffered a needless and unspeakable cruelty,” Judge Rufus Banks said to Chrisman. “There is nothing more precious than the innocence of a newborn child.”
Chrisman, 46, wept during most of the hearing in Chesapeake Circuit Court, while her ex-husband — and father of the boy — sat in the back of the courtroom. Deputy Commonwealth’s Attorney Stephanie Pass said the father wasn’t aware that Chrisman was pregnant, nor did he know that he’d had a son until she was arrested 17 years later.
“I’m sorry for all of this,” Chrisman told the judge before she was sentenced. “I’ve made mistakes in my life but I’m a good person. I’m a good mother.”
When Baby Daniel was found, Chrisman was 24 and living with her husband and a daughter who was born in 2001. Chrisman and her husband had another daughter in 2004, the year after Baby Daniel died. She initially denied that she was the boy’s mother, but admitted to it after being confronted with the DNA evidence.
Chrisman’s mother, Donna Edwards, testified that Chrisman was “the best” mother. She was often overprotective of her girls, and loved reading to them, Edwards said.
“Can you explain what would cause her to leave a child in the snow to die?” Pass asked Edwards on cross examination.
Edwards said she could only speculate. She said her daughter’s relationship with her husband was bad at the time and she was suffering mentally as a result.
“This was an action based on nothing more than panic and fear,” defense attorney Kurt Gilchrist told the judge, while also conceding there was “no excuse” for his client’s actions. He asked Banks to sentence her to no more than 15 years.
Pass argued that Chrisman “earned every day” of the 32 years that prosecutors had agreed to cap her sentence at for “throwing” her newborn son away “like trash in the snow.”
“A community had to name this child,” the prosecutor said. “The community of Chesapeake cared more about this baby than Ms. Chrisman ever did.”
Jane Harper, jane.harper@pilotonline.com
