DANBURY — The woman charged with murder in connection with the 2018 death of her newborn son first denied ever having a child, then later gave investigators several conflicting accounts of the baby’s birth and death, according to a recently unsealed arrest warrant.
Authorities charged Dominique Harrison, 28, of Danbury, with the class A felony on June 18, following a lengthy and complex investigation into the discovery of human remains at the City Carting & Recycling Center in Stamford on Oct. 16, 2018.
An employee at the facility found the remains of a full-term male baby. The facility provided collection services at the time for 11,000 customers in Connecticut’s Fairfield County and New York’s Westchester County, according to Harrison’s arrest warrant.
The state Office of the Chief Medical Examiner determined that the baby — which still had its umbilical cord attached — had been born alive and traveled approximately 250 feet through the recycling facility’s conveyor system, resulting in “blunt torso trauma, blunt extremity trauma and blunt head trauma with flattening of the skull.”
The baby had passed through three rotating drums with paddles, designed to “break up” compacted trash, before being dropped into a hopper where heavier items are separated from lighter ones, according to the warrant. That is where an employee first spotted the child, the warrant says.
In March 2019, the warrant says the medical examiner’s office ruled the baby’s cause of death as “being placed in the garbage” and its manner of death “homicide (neglect).”
A break finally came in October 2023, after nearly five years without a viable lead, when the warrant says Stamford police received information indicating the baby may be a descendant of a family in the Danbury-Bethel area.
Detectives spent the next two years using genealogy research, DNA comparisons and forensic testing to narrow the family tree, and eventually identified the baby’s father. The warrant says investigators confirmed his relationship to the child through DNA analysis of a cigarette they saw him discard while surveilling him in Danbury in November 2025.
The warrant says detectives identified Harrison from his Facebook profile as one of two women he appeared to have dated in 2018. Investigators also learned he and Harrison had “several interactions” with Danbury police between 2015 and 2024, with some police reports listing them as boyfriend/girlfriend, according to the warrant.
While surveilling Harrison in December 2025, the warrant says detectives collected a drinking straw they saw her discard in Brookfield and submitted it for DNA analysis. Three months later, a state lab report came back indicating the DNA profile from the straw was “consistent with Harrison being a biological parent of the newborn,” according to the warrant.
Conflicting accounts emerge
When Stamford police first made contact with Harrison in the driveway of her Danbury residence on March 31, 2026, the warrant says she initially told a detective she “never had a kid” but eventually admitted to giving birth.
Harrison told the detective she didn’t know she was pregnant at first, but started to suspect she was about four or five months into the pregnancy, and hid it from her family and the child’s father.
She went on to describe giving birth in a bathtub at her home one night while everyone in the residence was asleep, and how the baby cried before she cut the umbilical cord and wrapped him in a Snoopy blanket, according to the warrant.
Harrison told police she then carried the newborn downstairs, away from where the rest of the household was sleeping, and called a friend “to drop the baby off at the hospital,” the warrant says.
After putting the baby in his car, Harrison said the friend drove away and she went back inside to clean the bathroom where the birth occurred. Harrison told police the friend — whom Hearst Connecticut Media is identifying by the initials M.T. because he has not been charged with a crime — did not know she was pregnant and said they never spoke about what happened.
When investigators interviewed M.T. on April 3, 2026, the warrant says he told them he did drive a crying newborn wrapped in a blanket from Harrison’s home to Danbury Hospital one night. He insisted, however, that the events occurred in 2020 or 2021 — not 2018 — and said he knew Harrison was pregnant and they had discussed caring for the child before the birth, according to the warrant.
M.T. said he was confused as to why detectives “kept bringing up the year 2018” and said if the child in question was born at that time, it wouldn’t have been his.
During the course of the investigation, the warrant says police learned Harrison and M.T. had been in a relationship from about 2020 to 2022, and that Harrison had given birth to a second son in April 2021 whom she surrendered to Danbury Hospital under Connecticut’s Safe Haven laws.
The warrant says that baby was reportedly “covered in mud, twigs and other organic matter,” and Harrison told police she “rushed” the crying newborn outside after giving birth at her home, and M.T. got the baby minutes later to bring it to the hospital.
After interviewing M.T., the warrant says Harrison claimed to have “mixed up” details of her two pregnancies and told detectives the baby found at the Stamford recycling facility had been born the morning of Oct. 12, 2018.
During an April 6 interview, Harrison claimed she didn’t know she was pregnant until hours before giving birth in October 2018 and told police she believed the baby was stillborn because she said it never cried.
Her story, however, changed again. The warrant says Harrison later claimed to have heard the baby cry after giving birth to it in a partially-filled bathtub at her home. In that version of events, the warrant says she told detectives she left to retrieve a knife to cut the umbilical cord and returned to find the baby “submerged in water on its back.”
At one point during the April 6 interview, Harrison told police she wrapped the baby in Snoopy blankets and called a friend, who she said “scared her into thinking that if she brought the baby to the hospital that the staff would accuse her of contributing to its death.”
Harrison said she then brought the baby to a wooded area near Backus Avenue around 9:30 a.m. before picking her mother up from work. When her mother saw her in pain, Harrison told police, she insisted Harrison go to the hospital, where she said she reported “experiencing back problems to conceal that she just gave birth.”
Harrison claimed she returned to the wooded area later that day, found the baby “was gone” and “admitted … driving around with the baby in the front passenger seat” before deciding to put it in a dumpster behind a building on Backus Avenue because she “figured it was a goner,” according to the warrant.
The warrant says Harrison told police she chose the dumpster because “nobody was around and it was kind of secure” and later pointed detectives to one behind a Backus Avenue shopping plaza where she said she left the baby.
During a later interview, the warrant says Harrison acknowledged placing the baby in the dumpster while he was “still moving” and “not crying as much.”
From the investigation, the warrant says investigators concluded Harrison knew her baby was alive when she placed him in the dumpster and that the newborn later died after workers loaded the dumpster’s contents into a recycling truck.
Harrison has remained held on a $2.5 million bond since her June 23 arraignment at state Superior Court in Danbury, where she is next scheduled to appear July 10.