No charges for woman after bodies of 4 babies are found in Boston freezer

No charges will be filed against a 69-year-old woman after the bodies of four frozen infants were found in a Boston apartment freezer in 2022, the Suffolk County district attorney announced this week.

District Attorney Kevin Hayden called the investigation into the circumstances of the grim discovery on Nov. 17, 2022, “one of the most complex, unusual and perplexing that this office has ever encountered.”

Investigators don’t know whether the four babies were born alive, which in part led to the decision not to bring criminal charges, Hayden said in a statement Tuesday.

The babies were found in a freezer in an apartment in South Boston after a man called police and said his wife found them while she was cleaning out the apartment of the man’s sister, the district attorney’s office said.

The babies, two male and two female, were frozen solid in shoe boxes wrapped in foil, the prosecutor’s office said. DNA tests showed they were all siblings.

The medical examiner could not determine the cause of death or whether the babies were born alive — and there was no obvious trauma visible, the district attorney’s office said. The babies’ father, confirmed by DNA tests, died in 2011.

The mother is in a health-care facility and when investigators questioned her she “appeared confused and demonstrated a lack of understanding about where she was and who she was speaking to,” Hayden said in the statement.

“We will never know if the four babies were born alive, and we will never know exactly what happened to them,” he said, or why the woman concealed the pregnancies.

Investigators determined the woman had five children with the babies’ father, one of which was put up for adoption, Hayden said. The only birth record found was for the birth of one child, he said.

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com