A Child's Death Strikes Two Families

Dec. 3 -- A Georgia teenager has been acquitted of charges he sexually molested and killed the 2-year-old girl he was baby-sitting, but now the two families torn apart by the tragedy are trying to put their lives back together.

It began on July 25, 2001, when then-14-year-old Christopher Routh was baby-sitting 23-month-old Emily Woodruff, the daughter of a friend and co-worker of his mother, in suburban Atlanta. Somehow, Emily stopped breathing and Christopher called 911. The child was rushed to the hospital, but two days later she died.

Christopher said he had tried to reach the girl's parents and his own parents, but failed. He said the little girl was eating a cracker and it must have gotten stuck in her throat because she became unresponsive. He said he had tried reviving her with CPR.

That wasn't what the coroner found, though. According to the autopsy report, there were no traces of cracker in the girl's stomach. Instead, there was evidence that she had been sexually molested and violently shaken.

Christopher was arrested and charged with the crimes.

When he was acquitted on Nov. 22, his family breathed a sigh of relief and rejoiced that justice had been done.

"We knew that in the end we felt like the jury would find him innocent," Christopher's mother, Sissy Routh, said today on ABCNEWS' Good Morning America. "There just was not any evidence. So all we could do at that point was just thank God that truth and wisdom had found their way into the courtroom."

‘Shock and Disappointment’

But the Woodruffs had another reaction.

"I was very disappointed," Kim Woodruff, the little girl's mother, said on Good Morning America. "It was a shock and a disappointment."

Some people, including the prosecutor in the case, have interpreted remarks made by members of the jury about the case to mean that the verdict was not so much an exoneration of Christopher as it was the result of a failure on the part of the prosecutor to make the case strongly enough.