A baby was born and died in a Tampa college dorm room. Was it a crime?

TAMPA — Almost two days after she gave birth in her college dormitory bathroom, Brianna Moore sat in a campus security office with two Tampa police detectives old enough to be her father.

“I know things can get pretty big, pretty scary, pretty quick,” Detective Aaron Campbell told the 19-year-old freshman. “Can you tell me about the baby?”

“The baby?” Moore said.

It had been a few hours since police were directed to the dumpsters outside McKay Hall at the University of Tampa, where they found a lifeless baby girl inside a white trash bag. Campbell told Moore, a marine biology major, that she was very smart, that she knew about DNA, that people can be in over their heads sometimes.

“First of all, I did not even know that I was pregnant,” Moore said. “And then I just woke up not feeling good yesterday morning. So I went to the bathroom. … After a few seconds, it was dead.”

This was how Moore first explained what even she seemed to struggle to understand. Police, prosecutors and mental health experts would all scrutinize her words and actions. Later this month, a jury will do the same.

Jailed since last fall, Moore is set to face trial July 22 on aggravated manslaughter and other charges. Recently disclosed court records illuminate a complex criminal case that touches on issues of unplanned pregnancy and maternal health.

The records don’t tell the whole story. But they tell some of it.

Under scrutiny

Detectives spoke with Moore twice — once in the bare-walled security office where a sign warned that everything was recorded, and again days later while she sat in a police car.

During an hour of recorded conversation, investigators learned much about the young woman, her background and her version of events for the morning she gave birth.

In a light, Southern-accented voice, she sounded naïvely sincere. Although she was read her rights and at one point her father texted to tell her not to answer questions, she did anyway.

The detectives learned she lived with her mother and stepfather in Mississippi, on a farm with chickens, pigs, goats and peacocks.

She’d attended the Mississippi School for Mathematics and Science, a residential high school geared toward academically gifted students. She got excellent grades.

She came to the University of Tampa in August 2023 with a $30,000 scholarship. The private school sits on 110 acres just east of downtown, anchored by the towering minarets of Plant Hall, a historic brick edifice erected in the 1880s as the Tampa Bay Hotel. Palm trees and well-manicured lawns dominate the rest of the campus, where about 11,000 students study in mostly new, modern buildings.

It was “a pretty place,” she said, a far cry from what she was used to back home.

She lived with another young woman in a small room in McKay Hall, one of the campus’s oldest dorms, with a view of the Hillsborough River and downtown. They shared a bathroom with their two next-door neighbors.

Moore acknowledged that she and her roommate didn’t talk much. Her neighbors didn’t know her well, either.

She already had her class schedule for the fall semester when she studied for final exams that spring.

She awoke the morning of April 27, 2024, a Saturday. She’d struggled all night to sleep and didn’t feel well. She noticed her pants were wet, she said.

She quickly realized what was happening. She went into the bathroom and stayed there for about the next 90 minutes.

She threw up. She lay on the floor, paralyzed in pain.

The baby came. She heard it cry. She held it.

She was asked how long it cried.

“I would say, like, five seconds,” she said.

Her roommate and one of the girls next door heard the noise, they later told police, but dismissed it. One thought it might have been a video playing on a phone. When one neighbor readied for work, she tried the door, found it locked and heard Moore say, “Sorry.”

Moore laid the baby on a towel, she said. She took a shower, then tried to clean the blood from the floor. She sat for a long time.

“It wasn’t moving, so I felt for a heartbeat, and I didn’t feel one,” she said. “It wasn’t moving, and I got scared.”

She told investigators that she then wrapped the baby in the towel. She came out of the bathroom about 9:45 a.m., she said. She set the baby on the floor near an ottoman and took a nap.

She awoke about 11 a.m. and checked the baby again. It still wasn’t breathing.

That afternoon, her neighbors called campus security after seeing blood on the bathroom floor. A report of the call said a student had possibly suffered a miscarriage. Moore denied giving birth, saying she just had her period.

It wasn’t until the next evening that her roommate and a friend noticed the bloody towel and what they suspected was a baby in the trash bag.

They once again phoned security. They toted the bag outside. An officer met them near a set of dumpsters. When he peered in the bag, the baby lay wrapped in the towel, atop a pizza box. She looked, he said later, like “a small piglet.”

Up went the yellow crime scene tape.

A medical examiner determined the infant had several broken ribs along her spine and small hemorrhages in her lungs. Her cause of death was deemed “asphyxia due to compression of the torso with rib fractures.” The manner of death was homicide.

Early in her interview with the detectives, Moore was asked if she might have been in denial about being pregnant.

“Probably in denial,” she said. “I just kind of put it out of my head because I hadn’t had my period since last March.”

She later mentioned that she’d been on birth control in high school. But she had to get permission to leave her boarding school campus to pick up the prescription. It was a hassle, so she stopped.

She was asked if she knew when she became pregnant and who the father might have been.

“It’s between like two people,” she said. She gave police their names, one a young man close to her age, another a bit older.

She admitted that it had crossed her mind that she might be pregnant, but she dismissed the idea. She hadn’t gained much weight, she said. What little she did gain she attributed to the “freshman 15.” Her clothes still fit. She wore a belly ring.

Had anyone asked her if she was pregnant?

“Nobody,” she said.

The police would pull surveillance video from McKay Hall. They located footage that showed Moore walking through the dorm days before she gave birth. They said she had a noticeable bump on her abdomen.

Her roommates and others had noticed the bump as early as January. One woman said it was “obvious.” Moore said it “wasn’t that big.”

She was asked, if she could do things differently, what would she do?

“When I started feeling bad, probably go to the hospital,” she said. She added, though, that she couldn’t afford the trip. She said she’d thought about surrendering the baby at the hospital.

“Because you can do that, can’t you?” she said.

“You can,” the detective said.

A cryptic pregnancy

Nicole Graham, a forensic neuropsychologist, examined Moore in March and wrote a 20-page report that documented her family and relationship history and analyzed her thought processes. She detailed her findings in a lengthy pretrial deposition.

Graham concluded that Moore had what’s known as a “cryptic pregnancy,” an uncommon condition in which a woman either doesn’t know or is in denial that she is carrying a child.

Moore had a passive personality, Graham said, and was emotionally immature.

The psychologist reported that Moore had concerns about her body image. She didn’t feel like she fit in with other young women at the university.

She longed for a committed relationship, but sensed the young men she’d dated did not.

She struggled with self-esteem. She reported cutting her arms, Graham said, but not as a suicidal gesture, only as a way to feel something.

When Moore went into labor, she entered what Graham described as a mild dissociative state — a response to overwhelming trauma. In her mind, in that moment, time simultaneously sped up and slowed down.

Graham reported that Moore had trouble recalling specific details. Her perception and memory of the events surrounding the birth became blurry.

“Over the course of her life, she does have a tendency of not kind of engaging in problem solving,” Graham said. “And her ways that she copes is essentially avoiding, hoping it will go away.”

She related that Moore, as she endured labor pains, searched Google on her phone for things like, “How long after your water breaks do you deliver?” She worried about paying for a hospital, Graham said. And she didn’t want paramedics to bring attention to her. She tried to figure out if she could take an Uber to a hospital as she wondered whether the pain would subside.

“I thought about calling my mom, but I was scared,” Graham recalled her saying. She also thought about asking her roommates for help but feared what they would think or say.

She was in shock when the baby came. She said she held the little girl to her chest to “soothe” her.

She denied holding her too tight.

Moore cried when she talked about the birth, Graham said. She carries profound guilt and did things in the months afterward to try to make herself feel better, like looking after a pair of kittens, the psychologist said. She said she wanted to have something to care for.

There were other issues: Why she would put a baby in a small trash can? Why lay the baby down and go to sleep?

To many questions, Moore gave the same response: “I don’t know.”

What will a jury hear?

Hillsborough prosecutors have asked a judge to bar Graham from testifying. There has been no assertion that Moore was insane when she gave birth.

Assistant State Attorney Lindsey Hodges wrote in a court motion that the only purpose of Graham’s testimony would be “to garner sympathy from the jury.”

At the same time, the state wants to show the jury text messages they found on Moore’s phone, which she voluntarily turned over to police.

One text thread shows a conversation she had with a young man in Mississippi in September 2023. Amid what appears to be friendly banter, there is talk of sex, birth control and abortion. He asks if abortions are legal in Florida. She replies “no but there is a pill you can order in any state.” He asks questions about the pill, and she shares links to information she saved about it.

Prosecutors focused on one portion of the exchange:

“hey man sometimes you need a plan c,” Moore wrote.

“plan a was condoms,” he responded. “plan b was the pill. plan c was to kill (the) kid.”

“plan c is my favorite,” she replied.

Moore’s attorney, Jonah Dickstein, said prosecutors took the text messages out of context. They were not discussing her pregnancy, he said.

The person she messaged was not the father of her child, Dickstein said, nor did she know she was pregnant until the morning she gave birth.

“In those text messages with her friend from eight months earlier, she was just discussing the general legal status of birth control and abortion in Florida and other states,” Dickstein said in statement.

If Moore is found guilty of the most serious charge, she could receive up to 30 years in prison.

As the case barrels toward trial, new details may surface in a perplexing and unusual homicide case — one in which the suspect is the only one to have ever met the victim.

After the newborn was taken to a funeral home, Moore picked out an urn and took home her remains.

She named her baby Amara.