"Trouble"

Last Good Friday night Elizabeth Smith, 18, thick-waisted daughter of a strict Bronx family, stayed up with the family until around midnight. Early next morning, looking slimmer and paler than she had for some months, Elizabeth Smith took the family dog for a customary walk. Later that Saturday the Smith neighborhood was in an uproar of police car sirens, screeching housewives, giggling boys and girls. In the airshaft of the tenement next door to the Smiths', a newborn baby boy had been found dead, apparently dropped from the roof. Easter Sunday, detectives asked childish Elizabeth Smith if the dead child were hers. "Yes." said she.

According to Elizabeth, a married man had seduced her. Fearing her parents' wrath and counting on the nearsightedness of their rectitude, the frightened girl kept her growing secret, said nothing. Good Friday her labor began. The astounding fortitude of girls "in trouble'' sustained her, stifled her groans, betrayed her labor to her parents by not so much as a grimace. After her parents went to bed, she went to the bathroom. There, alone and without sound, crouching in a tormented daze, she bore her son. She thought, she swore in court last week, that he was born dead. After a rest the girl gathered her infant in her arms, mounted to the tenement roof. She walked to the neighboring airshaft, planning, she swore, to toss self and child over the edge. She fainted: the child fell alone.

Last week Elizabeth Smith's account of her labor and infanticide sounded true to a psychiatrist and an obstetrician, who appeared in court to support the defense's contention that the girl: 1) could have had a baby under the extraordinary circumstances she described and 2) would scarcely have known what she was doing for 18 hours afterward. A murder trial jury of twelve men, however, could not quite believe the whole of Elizabeth's tale. If she had not intended to have her child die, why had she not prepared a layette of some sort? Largely for that neglect the jury found Elizabeth Smith guilty of manslaughter, liable to 15 years imprisonment.

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