A Manhattan father recounted for jurors Thursday a babysitter’s bizarre behavior when his 2-month-old son almost choked to death on a baby wipe that prosecutors say she stuffed down his throat.
When he got a terrifying phone call from his wife that one of his young kids was in trouble, a panicked Dr. Salomon Blutreich called their nanny, Marianne Benjamin-Williams, as he raced home May 18, 2017.
“She said she saw something white in his throat,” he testified at Williams’ attempted murder trial in Manhattan Supreme Court.
“I said, ‘Turn him over and hit his back.’ She said, ‘I know what the f—k I’m doing!’ and hung up on me. I was shocked.”
The little boy, who had blood pouring from his mouth and could barely breathe, was rushed to Bellevue Hospital and into surgery.
As the family waited for an update on his condition, Williams buried her head in her hands and blurted, “I could go to jail for this. I could go to jail for this,” Blutreich told jurors.
Then she bizarrely rambled about how she wouldn’t return to their home to work until they installed cameras in every room, including the bathroom.
“At that point, I thought he was going to be either dead or brain dead,” the dad said of his child.
Then Williams suddenly jumped up and said she had to go to a movie premiere and left to get her bags from their East 25th Street apartment, he said.
She returned to the hospital to drop off clothes for their 14-month-old daughter, which is when the surgeon emerged from the operating room to tell them they had removed a 6 by 15 inch wipe from their son’s tiny airway.
Blutreich said the baby wipes they typically used were small and translucent, while the size and thickness of the one doctors recovered resembled a medical or cleaning wipe.
The baby also had a deep wound on his tongue that the surgeon had to close with stitches.




