The murder charge against Hepay Juma follows months in which the unidentified newborn’s death had already become a public loss in Manchester.
MANCHESTER, N.H. — By the time New Hampshire authorities charged Hepay Juma with killing her newborn daughter, the baby found in Pine Island Pond already had a name, a funeral and a place in the public life of Manchester.
That unusual path gave the case a different shape from many homicide prosecutions. Officials announced Feb. 26 that Juma, 26, had been arrested on a charge of reckless second-degree murder in the death of Baby Jane “Grace” Doe, the infant whose body was recovered from Pine Island Pond on March 27, 2025. But long before the arrest, residents had followed the case as the story of a child first known only as a newborn found dead in the water. Police later used the name Baby Grace in public appeals, and a funeral was held months before any mother or suspect had been publicly identified.
The first facts were stark and spare. On March 27, 2025, Manchester police responded around 4 p.m. to Pine Island Park off Brown Avenue after a report of a body in the pond. Officers found what appeared to be the body of a newborn girl in the water. The attorney general’s office joined the inquiry the same day, and officials quickly said the death was suspicious. Even that first announcement carried two layers of concern. One was the obvious question of how a newborn ended up in a public pond. The other was whether the mother might be in medical danger herself. Police made clear at the time that they were worried about her condition and did not know where she was. Those concerns faded from the public record as the months passed, but they showed how uncertain the case was in its earliest hours.
What followed was a long period in which Manchester residents learned about the baby in fragments. Investigators said the child was newborn. They later narrowed the time frame and said they believed the body had been placed in the pond between March 25 and March 27. Police sought tips and publicized a reward. Yet the most important facts remained out of view. Officials did not publicly identify the mother, the cause of death or the place where the baby had been born or injured. In that vacuum, the case took on a civic dimension. The infant was publicly named Baby Grace. A funeral was held. The attention was not driven by celebrity or spectacle but by the unsettling fact that the victim was a baby whose family story, at least publicly, had vanished almost as soon as her life began.
The arrest announcement altered that story but did not complete it. Prosecutors said Juma caused the death of her child under circumstances manifesting extreme indifference to the value of human life. Senior Assistant Attorney General Nicholas Chong Yen said the arrest meant the state considered the death a homicide and believed Juma caused it. But officials still withheld much of the factual narrative. The public record reviewed for this story does not describe the baby’s injuries or the exact manner of death. It does not explain how investigators connected Juma to the infant after nearly a year. It does not say whether DNA, medical records, witness statements, digital evidence or some combination of those tools led to the charge. As a result, the emotional outline of the case is clearer in public than the forensic one.
That split between public grief and limited detail has shaped the way the story is understood. In many homicide cases, the person charged dominates the coverage immediately. Here, for months, the victim did. The public first encountered the story through the image of a baby recovered from a pond and through official efforts to honor her with a name. Only later did the prosecution identify the mother and define the death as murder. Law and Crime reported the prosecutor’s statement that the child “was discarded,” wording that aligns with the state’s accusation but also helps explain why the case hit residents so hard. The phrase suggests not only death but abandonment, and that sense of abandonment had already been part of the story before a defendant’s name was ever released.
The legal process now has to catch up with the emotional force of the case. Local reporting said Juma waived arraignment the day after her arrest and was held without bail. A probable cause hearing was set for March 5. Those early proceedings are likely to determine when the public hears more about what investigators believe happened before the baby was found in the pond. For now, the state has made one allegation clear: the child’s death was not accidental and, in prosecutors’ view, was caused by her mother. The defense response, based on the public reports reviewed here, has not yet been laid out in detail.
Manchester first knew the victim as Baby Grace. The court now knows the case by a defendant’s name and a murder charge. The next stage will decide whether prosecutors can turn that public grief into a proven criminal case.
Author note: Last updated March 25, 2026.