Early last Tuesday, according to police, Peterson, now a freshman at Gettysburg College, helped Grossberg, a student at the University of Delaware, give birth to a full-term baby boy in a $56-a-night room at the Comfort Inn in Newark, Del. Then, authorities say, he put the newborn inside a gray plastic bag and set it in a trash container in the motel's parking lot. Police found the dead infant that morning.
``People are very surprised and very saddened by everything that has happened,'' said Stacey Schmeidel, a spokeswoman for Gettysburg College.
Grossberg, who with Peterson attended Ramapo High School in Bergen County, N.J., was arrested and arraigned last night on first-degree murder charges after being released from Christiana Hospital in Newark. Magistrate Judge Rosalie Rutkowski had her held without bail and ordered a psychiatric evaluation.
The reason she was hospitalized was unclear but was believed to be associated with the delivery, said Lt. Roy Clough of the Newark police.
Peterson also faces a first-degree murder charge. Delaware Attorney General M. Jane Brady said yesterday that authorities were uncertain of Peterson's whereabouts, adding that he was neither at his mother and stepfather's home in Wyckoff, N.J., nor at his father's house in Dix Hills, Long Island, N.Y.
Brady said Peterson's attorneys had contacted her office and said they would like to arrange their client's possible surrender.
``It would be more expedient if he comes to Delaware and turns himself in than for us to try to extradite him,'' Brady said.
Clough said that after the baby was delivered, Peterson returned to Gettysburg, and Grossberg went back to her campus dormitory in Newark. She became ill, he said, and was taken by an ambulance to Christiana Hospital.
There, Clough said, Grossberg initially denied to the doctors treating her that she had given birth. Police interviewed her friends on campus, and eventually located Peterson at Gettysburg College.
