A friend’s 11:18 p.m. photograph and medical findings helped investigators reconstruct the night 5-day-old Jah’Shawn Martin became unresponsive.
PITTSBURGH, Pa. — Shortly after 11 p.m. on Dec. 15, 2023, a friend entered a Northview Heights home because the mother of a 5-day-old boy could not reach the child’s father. Less than four hours later, the newborn was dead, beginning a homicide case that would take more than two years to reach a final sentence.
The sequence pieced together through testimony, police records and court proceedings became the backbone of the prosecution of Shawn Martin, Jah’Shawn Martin’s father. Martin, now 32, ultimately entered a no-contest plea to third-degree murder and endangering the welfare of a child rather than stand trial in July 2026. Allegheny County Common Pleas Judge Eliot Howsie sentenced him to 11 to 28 years in state prison. The plea resolved the criminal case, but authorities never publicly supplied a detailed minute-by-minute account explaining precisely how the newborn sustained the injuries that killed him.
The day had begun with the ordinary obligations of caring for a newborn. Prosecutors said Jah’Shawn, born Dec. 11, had been released from the hospital with his mother two days later. She then had to return to the hospital because of complications, leaving the infant and a 2-year-old child with Martin. On Dec. 15, Martin took Jah’Shawn to his first pediatric appointment in Oakland at about 3:45 p.m. and returned to Northview Heights at about 5 p.m. Martin later told detectives that he fed and burped the baby and placed him in a bouncer near the couch.
Martin’s account was that he fell asleep that evening. Evidence presented during his 2024 preliminary hearing added other details. Hezekiah Odom, whom Martin knew closely, testified that he visited the home earlier that night after buying a bottle of liquor at Martin’s request. Odom said he stayed for about 15 minutes. He recalled taking two shots himself but did not recall seeing Martin drink, and he said he did not see the baby during that visit. He eventually left after his girlfriend called and asked him to come home to watch their children.
The more consequential contact came later. Jah’Shawn’s mother told investigators that she and Martin were connected by phone around 10 p.m. and both fell asleep while the call remained open. When she woke around 10:45 p.m., she heard the baby crying in a way that concerned her, according to prosecutors’ account of her statement. She tried to wake Martin through the phone but received no response. After the call ended, she repeatedly tried to reach him again. Unable to do so from the hospital, she contacted Odom and asked him to go back to the residence.
Odom testified that he had to get through the back door to enter. He found Martin asleep and Jah’Shawn in a baby seat. At 11:18 p.m., he photographed the infant and sent the picture to the child’s mother to show her what he had found. She thought Jah’Shawn was positioned improperly and asked Odom to wake Martin. Odom did so and left. He had only recently returned home when the mother contacted him again, this time saying the baby was not breathing. Seeing emergency lights near the residence, Odom ran back toward the home.
First responders were dispatched late that night and found Jah’Shawn unresponsive. He was transported to UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh in critical condition. Doctors could not save him, and he was pronounced dead shortly after 3 a.m. Dec. 16. What initially appeared from outside the home to be a medical emergency quickly became a homicide investigation after medical personnel identified severe trauma. The Allegheny County Medical Examiner’s Office ultimately listed blunt-force trauma to the head as the cause of death.
At the preliminary hearing, forensic pathologist Dr. Jennifer Hammers provided evidence that narrowed investigators’ search for an explanation. She testified that Jah’Shawn had extensive fractures around his skull and other injuries, including trauma to an arm. She said the head injuries required extreme force and were unlike injuries she had seen in other infant autopsies during a career that included thousands of examinations. Prosecutors used her testimony to reject the possibility that the newborn had simply fallen a few inches from a bouncer or a short distance from furniture. Hammers also testified that a 2-year-old could not have produced the necessary force.
Martin told investigators that he did not know what had happened. According to detective testimony, he said he had been asleep and maintained that the only people in the residence were himself and the two children. Detectives raised possible scenarios, asking whether he might have tripped while holding Jah’Shawn, whether there had been a vehicle accident or whether some other event could explain the injuries. Martin denied those possibilities. His lawyer at the preliminary hearing argued that investigators had not found a weapon and that the evidence left unanswered questions about the exact mechanism of injury.
Prosecutors argued that the absence of a separate weapon did not defeat the case. They said a hard surface could have caused the injuries described by the pathologist if the child had been struck against it, and they emphasized that the medical testimony excluded the minor falls considered by investigators. District Judge Hilary Wheatley found enough evidence in February 2024 to send the homicide charge to county court. Martin had been arrested the previous month after Pittsburgh police and members of the U.S. Marshals Western Pennsylvania Fugitive Task Force located him in the city’s Brookline area.
The legal path after that ruling was not straight. In June 2025, Martin pleaded guilty to third-degree murder under an agreement that contemplated a sentence below the statutory maximum. Prosecutors again described the medical evidence and the events leading to Jah’Shawn’s death. Martin later withdrew the plea before he was sentenced. That decision put the case back on course for a jury trial, leaving prosecutors to prepare once more to present witnesses, medical testimony and the chronology of the night to jurors.
On July 28, 2026, jurors were waiting for the trial to begin when the case instead ended with another negotiated disposition. This time Martin pleaded no contest to third-degree murder and child endangerment. A no-contest plea allowed the court to enter convictions without requiring Martin to make the same factual admission associated with an ordinary guilty plea. Howsie sentenced him to 11 to 28 years for murder and a concurrent 10-to-20-year term for endangering the welfare of a child. The judge sharply criticized the conduct underlying the prosecution and described the case as one of the worst he had encountered.
The sentence establishes the legal outcome, but it does not change a central limitation of the public record: no trial occurred in which a jury heard and resolved every disputed detail about the final hours inside the home. The available evidence establishes when concern arose, when Odom entered the residence, when the photograph was taken, when emergency help was summoned and what doctors found. Martin’s no-contest plea and resulting conviction closed the prosecution without requiring a jury to choose between competing accounts of how the fatal injuries were inflicted.
Martin has remained in custody since his Jan. 12, 2024, arrest. His concurrent prison terms leave 11 years as the minimum sentence imposed for the murder conviction and 28 years as the maximum. For Jah’Shawn’s family, the court proceedings that followed the infant’s five days of life have ended at the trial level. The photograph taken at 11:18 p.m., the worried calls from the hospital and the medical evidence that followed became part of a record that now ends with Martin serving a state prison sentence.
Author note: Last updated August 30, 2026.