Evidence preserved in Boston Irish nanny case

A lawyer for Irish nanny Aisling McCarthy Brady has secured an order from a Massachusetts court to preserve a wide range of evidence, including a laptop, emails and medical records, as part of her defence against assault and battery charges over the death of one-year-old British baby Rehma Sabir last month.

Middlesex county district court judge Severlin B Singleton III granted a motion to preserve as evidence a large number of items, including the Sabir family laptop and all documents, emails, internet searches and the hard drive of the computer for the period since January 18th, 2012.

Prosecutors, who agreed to the motion, claim Ms McCarthy Brady (34) assaulted the infant, who was in her care on January 14th at an apartment on Ash Street in Quincy, a suburb of Boston, causing head injuries leading to the child’s death two days later. The married Irish woman, who was in court yesterday but unseen, has denied the charges.

After the court hearing, defence lawyer Melinda Thompson said Ms McCarthy Brady, who moved to the US from Cavan in 2002 and now lives in Quincy, was “upset”.

“She’s devastated because she didn’t do this,” Ms Thompson said. Prosecutors have said the nanny could be charged with murder once the postmortem report is completed.

Ms McCarthy Brady has been remanded on bail of $500,000 (€379,000) and will reappear on March 22nd.

Among the items preserved as evidence are the nanny’s mobile phone, seized by police on January 16th, 2013, including details of toll records, text messages, voicemails and all other phone-stored data.

The court has also preserved all of Rehma’s medical records since her birth, including but not limited to all of her paediatricians’ records and records of specialists including haematology and infectious disease reports.

List of visitors

The defence has secured the preservation of a list of people who lived and stayed in the Sabir family apartment and had access to Rehma from October 2012 to January 14th, 2013.

The nanny’s lawyer also secured the preservation of the travel itinerary of the child from June 2012 to January 2013, including the names of the people she travelled with, where she stayed, and “whether she was examined by medical personnel during her extensive travel abroad”, the motion record filed in court said.