A Child's Death Strikes Two Families

Dec. 3, 2002 -- A Georgia teenager has been acquitted of charges he sexually molested and killed the 2-year-old girl he was baby-sitting, but now the two families torn apart by the tragedy are trying to put their lives back together.

It began on July 25, 2001, when then-14-year-old Christopher Routh was baby-sitting 23-month-old Emily Woodruff, the daughter of a friend and co-worker of his mother, in suburban Atlanta. Somehow, Emily stopped breathing and Christopher called 911. The child was rushed to the hospital, but two days later she died.

Christopher said he had tried to reach the girl's parents and his own parents, but failed. He said the little girl was eating a cracker and it must have gotten stuck in her throat because she became unresponsive. He said he had tried reviving her with CPR.

That wasn't what the coroner found, though. According to the autopsy report, there were no traces of cracker in the girl's stomach. Instead, there was evidence that she had been sexually molested and violently shaken.

Christopher was arrested and charged with the crimes.

When he was acquitted on Nov. 22, his family breathed a sigh of relief and rejoiced that justice had been done.

"We knew that in the end we felt like the jury would find him innocent," Christopher's mother, Sissy Routh, said today on ABCNEWS' Good Morning America. "There just was not any evidence. So all we could do at that point was just thank God that truth and wisdom had found their way into the courtroom."

‘Shock and Disappointment’

But the Woodruffs had another reaction.

"I was very disappointed," Kim Woodruff, the little girl's mother, said on Good Morning America. "It was a shock and a disappointment."

Some people, including the prosecutor in the case, have interpreted remarks made by members of the jury about the case to mean that the verdict was not so much an exoneration of Christopher as it was the result of a failure on the part of the prosecutor to make the case strongly enough.

"We felt like the prosecution really didn't present their case very well," one juror said. "They didn't in effect have a smoking gun."

Lives of the Sons

Those kinds of statements anger the Rouths, who suffered through more than a year of anxiety about what would happen to their son.

"I think that it's a sad statement that a district attorney would say that just because you weren't proved guilty doesn't mean that you're innocent," Sissy Routh said. "What happened to presumed innocence, which is allowed by our Constitution?"

Christopher, an honor student who returns to school on Jan. 8, said he would like to put the last 17 months behind him.

"I'm going to be a teenager again," he said, though he admitted it will be hard. "This will always be with me. I knew in my heart that I was not guilty all along. But it definitely stays with you."

The Woodruffs have found their only consolation in their other child, a son a year older than Emily.

"Hunter, our son, does need us," Lewis Woodruff said. "We continue on and we live day to day for our son's sake."