Ashling Brady McCarthy: 'What was done to me was scandalous'

Irish nanny Ashling Brady McCarthy has described as “scandalous” her treatment at the hands of US prosecutors who charged her with murdering a baby in her care.

Charges were dropped against the 37-year-old from Lavey, Co Cavan, after the medical examiner’s office reversed its previous position and concluded that the death of one-year-old Rehma Sabir was not a homicide caused by shaken baby syndrome.

The medical examiner said in his ruling that the child’s medical history “could have made her prone to easy bleeding with relatively minor trauma”.

“I believe that enough evidence has been presented to raise the possibility that the bleeding could have been related to an accidental injury in a child with a bleeding risk or possibly could have even been a result of an undefined natural disease,” he said.

Ms Brady McCarthy, who, after two-and-a-half years in jail, was released last May on $15,000 bail and placed under house arrest with an electronic bracelet attached to her ankle.

She returned to Ireland yesterday, flying into Shannon in the early morning. Asked if she was glad to be home, she simply responded “Yes”.

Before she boarded that flight, she spoke to Boston Globe writer Peter Gelzinis, who had thoroughly covered her case.

She told him: “Suddenly, everything is happening so fast after 
going so … so very slow for almost three years. I can’t wait to get home and start my life over again. My worst nightmare is finally over.”

She added: “What the Middlesex prosecutors did to me was scandalous..They should be ashamed of themselves. The police and (Dr.) Alice Newton, they just decided right away that I had killed the child. That couldn’t be further from the truth. I loved her and cared for her, 10 hours a day, five days a week…

“They were wrong, but it seemed that except for my family and my lawyers, Melinda (Thompson) and David Meier, God bless them, no one would listen.”

She also told Gelzinis that the support and love she received from other families whose children she had cared for “were a huge source of support and comfort to me”.

She recalled: “They would come every week to visit m. The kids would bring me drawings and little gifts... (The families) assured me that they would be there, to testify on my 
behalf when the trial came.”

Ms Brady McCarthy is believed to have returned to her native Cavan.

McCarthy, an Irish immigrant living illegally in the United States since 2002, was ordered held without bail until last May.