A forensic pathologist said 5-day-old Jah’Shawn Martin suffered injuries inconsistent with ordinary household accidents considered by investigators.
PITTSBURGH, Pa. — The criminal case over the death of 5-day-old Jah’Shawn Martin turned heavily on a medical question: Could the devastating injuries found after he became unresponsive in a Northview Heights home have happened by accident? A forensic pathologist’s answer helped carry the case from a preliminary hearing to his father’s eventual murder conviction.
More than two years after Jah’Shawn died, Shawn Martin, 32, entered a no-contest plea to third-degree murder and endangering the welfare of a child and was sentenced July 28 to 11 to 28 years in prison. The disposition meant prosecutors did not have to present their medical case to a jury. Much of that evidence, however, had already been aired publicly at a February 2024 preliminary hearing, where the pathologist who performed the autopsy described extensive blunt-force trauma and explained why several accidental scenarios did not account for it.
Dr. Jennifer Hammers testified that Jah’Shawn sustained multiple fractures around his skull from what she characterized as crushing-force trauma. The injuries extended around different areas of the infant’s head, and she also identified trauma involving his right arm. Hammers, whose career had included thousands of autopsies, said the head trauma was the most severe she had seen in an infant. In explaining the amount of force involved, she compared injuries of that magnitude in an adult to those associated with extreme falls or being struck by a large vehicle. She also explained that an infant’s more pliable skull would require substantial force to fracture so extensively.
The significance of the testimony was not simply that Jah’Shawn had been badly injured. It was that Hammers rejected the low-height falls that might otherwise have offered an accidental explanation. A fall from a couch to the floor could not account for the trauma, she testified, nor could a fall of only a few inches from the baby’s seat. She further testified that a 2-year-old child could not generate the force required. Those conclusions mattered because investigators said the only people in the residence during the relevant period were Martin, the newborn and Jah’Shawn’s 2-year-old sibling.
Defense attorney Patrick Nightingale, who represented Martin at the preliminary hearing, focused on what investigators had not found. Police had not recovered a weapon that clearly explained the injuries, and the defense argued that the precise event causing them remained unknown. Prosecutors countered that a distinct weapon was not necessary. They argued that a hard surface could have produced the trauma if the infant had been struck against it. District Judge Hilary Wheatley did not decide Martin’s ultimate guilt at that hearing, but she found the prosecution had presented enough evidence to hold the homicide charge for further court proceedings.
The medical evidence followed an emergency call from Martin’s Northview Heights residence late on Dec. 15, 2023. Jah’Shawn had been born four days earlier and had been home from the hospital only briefly. His mother had returned to a hospital for treatment of complications, and Martin was caring for Jah’Shawn and another young child. Prosecutors said Martin took the newborn to his first pediatric visit that afternoon. By that night, Jah’Shawn’s mother became concerned after hearing the child crying during a phone connection and then being unable to wake or reach Martin.
She contacted Hezekiah Odom, a friend of Martin’s, and asked him to check the residence. Odom testified that he entered the home, found Martin asleep and saw Jah’Shawn in a baby seat. He took a photograph at 11:18 p.m. and sent it to the mother. She thought the infant did not look properly positioned and asked Odom to wake Martin. Odom left after doing so. Within a short time, he was told Jah’Shawn was no longer breathing. Emergency personnel took the baby to UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh, where he was pronounced dead shortly after 3 a.m. Dec. 16.
Martin’s statements to investigators created another part of the prosecution’s evidentiary picture. Detectives testified that he said he had been asleep and did not know what had happened to the baby. During a later interview, investigators asked about possible accidents, including whether Martin had fallen while holding Jah’Shawn or whether another event had caused the trauma. He denied those scenarios. He nevertheless maintained that he did not know the source of the injuries. A detective testified that a recording of the 911 call also captured Martin saying he was sorry in the background, though the statement by itself did not explain what had occurred.
Pittsburgh police arrested Martin on Jan. 12, 2024, on a homicide warrant. The department said detectives from its Violent Crime Unit and Fugitive Apprehension Unit worked with the U.S. Marshals Western Pennsylvania Fugitive Task Force to locate him in Brookline. He was initially charged with criminal homicide and endangering the welfare of a child. The preliminary hearing the next month supplied the first extensive public presentation of the physical evidence, placing the autopsy findings alongside testimony about the calls, the photograph and Martin’s statements.
More than a year later, the case appeared headed toward a negotiated end. Martin pleaded guilty to third-degree murder in June 2025. Prosecutors described the injuries and the sequence surrounding Jah’Shawn’s death, and the proposed agreement allowed for a sentence below the maximum available for third-degree murder. But Martin withdrew that plea before sentencing. The withdrawal reopened the possibility of a trial where prosecutors would have had to prove the charge beyond a reasonable doubt and the defense could have challenged the medical and circumstantial evidence before a jury.
That trial never took place. In July 2026, with jurors assembled and the case scheduled to begin, Martin entered a new agreement. He pleaded no contest to third-degree murder and endangering the welfare of a child. Unlike his earlier guilty plea, a no-contest plea did not require him to make the same formal admission to the allegations, but it allowed Howsie to enter convictions and impose punishment. Howsie sentenced Martin to 11 to 28 years on the murder count and 10 to 20 years on the child-endangerment count, with the terms running concurrently.
The judge’s remarks shifted the final hearing from the technical medical questions that had dominated the earlier proceeding to the gravity of the case as a whole. Howsie told Martin that the matter ranked among the worst he had handled as a lawyer or judge. He also said the conduct was serious enough that an argument for capital punishment could be imagined, while noting his own opposition to the death penalty. The actual conviction before him was third-degree murder, and the negotiated sentence was far below a death sentence or life imprisonment.
The plea leaves some factual questions unresolved in the public record because there was no trial testimony establishing a single detailed account of exactly what happened to Jah’Shawn inside the residence. The medical findings were much clearer about what did not explain his death: according to Hammers, the injuries were not consistent with the short falls proposed during questioning, and a toddler could not have caused them. The medical examiner ultimately attributed the death to blunt-force trauma to the head, and the case proceeded on that basis through Martin’s conviction.
For prosecutors, the medical evidence supplied a way to test the explanations considered during the investigation against the infant’s injuries. For the defense, the lack of a witnessed event and an identified weapon left room to contest how the trauma occurred. The no-contest plea prevented a jury from resolving that contest after a full trial. Instead, the case ended with the medical findings that helped send Martin to court remaining part of the foundation for the conviction under which he is now serving an 11-to-28-year state prison sentence.
Author note: Last updated August 30, 2026.