15-Month-Old Pennsylvania Baby Dead After Being Violently Shaken By 'Frustrated' Mother

A 26-year-old Pennsylvania mother was charged with homicide five days after the death of her 15-month-old baby. The incident took place in Adams County on Saturday.

Local police said that Felisha L. Ellis called 911 and when dispatchers arrived she told them that she had dropped the girl and that the child was not breathing. The child was flown from her home in the 1900 block of Upper Bermudian Road, Tyrone Township, to Penn State Health Milton S. Hershey Medical Center, where she died Monday.

Ellis told them she had gotten custody of the girl in February. Doctors told investigators the child’s “numerous, very serious” injuries could not have been caused by a fall, police said.

State police at Gettysburg said Thursday that Ellis admitted to shaking the child repeatedly. When questioned, Ellis “explained being frustrated and upset.” Police said Ellis then admitted she had shaken the child.

In a similar incident last month, a mother from Glendale, Arizona was charged with child abuse after her toddler son was admitted to the hospital with life-threatening injuries. The suspect, identified as 25-year-old Raejene Danae Dixon, admitted to police that she punched and spanked her 2-year-old son “numerous times in the past week.”

On the day of the incident, police and the paramedics responded to an apartment unit near 75th and Glendale avenues that Dixon shares with her boyfriend. Upon arrival, deputies found the boyfriend trying to revive the child by providing him CPR. The officials immediately rushed him to the hospital. While taking him to the ambulance, the paramedics noticed bruises on the child’s face and torso.

When police questioned Dixon’s boyfriend about the bruises, he said the boy “had been spanked and some of those bruises could have been caused from administering discipline.”