Staff photos / R. Michael Semple Brittany Watts of Warren, center, with her attorney, Traci Timko, left, and Lea Dotson, bow their heads in prayer at the end of a support rally for Watts on Thursday. Dotson organized the rally in support of Watson.

WARREN — Brittany Watts said she was almost brought to her knees inside her Tod Avenue home when her attorney, Traci Timko, called to tell her that charges were no longer being considered against her months after her miscarriage became part of a national conversation.

“All I wanted to do was cry because this was such a huge weight lifted off of my shoulders,” Watts said.

That day, Watts, 34, had been of the mindset there would be a support rally for her later on at Courthouse Square in downtown Warren. That rally turned into a celebration after a Trumbull County grand jury opted not to indict her on a felony charge of abuse of a corpse.

“I still wanted to meet, but I wanted the tone to shift from ‘Justice for Brittany’ to rejoicing that I had gotten some vindication,” Watts said.

She continued, “With the case dismissed now and charges dropped, I just want to take this opportunity to heal,” Watts said. “I want to take the time to heal and grieve and cry and kick and scream and feel all of the things you feel when you lose somebody.”

When she does mourn, she’ll mourn for the son she never had the opportunity to raise, Angel Watts, the name she had planned to give her son.

“I lost somebody that meant the world to me so I want time to mourn that loss in private without a camera in my face,” Watts said. “The thing that brings me comfort and solace is that my father, Floyd Watts, who died when I was 12, is now in heaven together with my son who would’ve been his first grandchild by me.”

Before this, she said, “anyone that knows me knows I’m quiet and they know I love my Lord and savior, Jesus Christ. I’ve always been the one that will cry with you or pray for you.”

She said the media attention has been “mind blowing,” since national and worldwide eyes were drawn to a private, intimate moment in her small town northeast Ohio life.

“When I went to school to be a medical receptionist I wanted to be in the medical field to be able to help people, but I never expected this was the platform I’d be thrust into,” Watts said. “Now I get phone calls from women all across the country, people I watch on a regular basis asking to do interviews or people mentioning me, like attorney Ben Crump, who handled the George Floyd and Breonna Taylor cases. I never thought my name would come out of his mouth.”

She said she’s been sent links of TV personalities discussing her ordeal.

One downside to the newfound attention was having been “swatted” on Christmas Day after someone called police telling them she had been shot and killed. Stepping outside, Watts said she saw lines of police cars and EMTs outside her home as she assured them she was safe.

Three months after seeing Watts go through Warren Municipal Court, before even being her legal counsel, Timko said she can’t help but look back on how her client got here.

“The answer is clear,” Timko said. “There is a need for legislative clarity and education. If the term corpse was clearly defined in the criminal code, this wouldn’t have happened.”

The attorney called the investigation, followed by no bill decision of the grand jury a “hallmark of vindication.”

HER STORY

Watts, at 21 weeks and five days pregnant, said something “didn’t feel right,” as she had been passing thick blood clots, later learning during her OB-GYN appointment the morning of Sept. 19, 2023, that her amniotic fluid was dangerously low after her water broke prematurely.

“She was doing the ultrasound and she said, ‘I can feel the baby’s head’ and I’m thinking that’s not a good thing,” Watts said.

At her doctor’s advice, Watts was taken across the street in an ambulance to St. Joseph Warren Hospital’s labor and delivery wing where she was hooked up to an IV and waited to hear from a doctor about what would be next.

“She noticed there was a heartbeat, but it was a faint one. So they figured the baby wasn’t going to last too long,” Watts said.

Faced with the realization from doctors that her pregnancy was non-viable, she said she waited for hours, twiddling with her hair and fingers as she wondered, “What do we do now?”

“They just kept coming in to say, ‘well if we just wait a little bit longer, just a little longer and we’ll figure something out,'” Watts said, a sentiment that grew tiresome around 4:30 p.m.

She would later come to learn from her attorney after reviewing her medical records that hospital staff had been consulting with the hospital’s ethics committee.

“I’m thinking in my mind I’m carrying a possibly stillborn baby. And you’re (the hospital) not going to get it out of me. Knowing that they were waiting on an ethics committee during that time doesn’t seem ethical to me,” Watts said.

By 5 p.m., she decided to leave.

But the next day, more bleeding sent Watts back to the labor and delivery room seeking answers but she said doctors had none. Instead, Watts said doctors expressed concern for the fact that she had left the previous day.

“I didn’t think they seemed concerned when I sat for almost eight hours,” Watts said, but she was hooked back up to an IV.

“They were skeptical about what to do so again, I left,” Watts said. “I left against ‘medical advice’ but to me it was more like I was leaving due to their inaction while I was writhing in pain.”

At home the early morning hours of Sept. 22, Watts said she struggled to find comfort that had her alternating between sitting, standing, and walking back and forth around the house to find some way of easing the pain she was enduring, “and that lasted about two hours which led us to about 5:30 when I went to the bathroom.”

Sitting on the toilet, she said all of a sudden she heard a splash, “and I’m feeling, rubbing on my stomach thinking maybe I just had to go to the bathroom but then I look down and I see blood everywhere. I looked and I’m like I just had this baby,” Watts said.

Watts began scooping the fetal remains into a bucket.

“I wasn’t sure where the baby was and whether or not he had just been in all of the matter that had been in the toilet,” Watts said. “There was tissue and clorox wipes that I didn’t want to flush so I had dumped it in the backyard, thinking to myself that that was all there was left of my baby.”

But Watts would later learn that her toilet had been removed and taken to the Trumbull County Coroner’s Office to chisel the fetal remains out of the toilet that had gotten lodged when Watts flushed it — something she said she never would’ve imagined.

At a preliminary hearing, Warren City Prosecutor Lewis Guarnieri said, “The issue isn’t how the child died or when the child died. It’s the fact that the baby was put into a toilet and was large enough to clog up the toilet, left in that toilet, and she went on (with) her day.”

Watts now says, “because that’s what women do when they miscarry. They go on about their day.”

Ahead of a family function, Watts still tried to maintain a normal disposition as her family had still been unaware of her pregnancy. “I only had a tiny bump, I’m already small so it went unnoticed.”

So, after cleaning up the scene of her miscarriage, she wore an adult diaper, after she had bled through her clothes the first time she tried getting dressed.

She drove herself to her hair appointment while ailing from a potentially fatal hemorrhage.

“She started my hair but because I was writhing in pain and bleeding she had stopped to see if I was okay,” Watts said, initially telling her hairstylist that she was menstruating to avoid speaking of the miscarriage.

The hairdresser’s concerns caused her to call her aunt, then her mother, who was the one that took Watts back to the hospital to be readmitted.

INVOLVEMENT OF AUTHORITIES

The nurse who comforted Watts as she again was hooked back up to an IV, “rubbing my back and asking questions,” was later the one who phoned police dispatch informing them that Watts had left the hospital a week prior, “against medical advice” but had come back again telling law enforcement, “She says her baby’s in her backyard in a bucket,” according to the dispatch call.

Looking back to her interaction, Watts questioned what the expectation was.

“Why would I even have thought to bring it with me?”

Then, Watts said her phone started pinging updates from an app connected to her security cameras at home.

“I opened my phone to see all of these police cars on my street so I’m wondering what’s going on thinking maybe something happened with a neighbor,” Watts said.

When she inquired with the officers from her phone they told her that they called to investigate her home after reports that she had come to the hospital without her baby.

Watts said she was interviewed by Warren Police Detective Nick Carney, who she said assured her she was not in any trouble, “which he said before he turned on his recording for the interview,” she said.

As she looks back now, holding a copy of the newspaper with her face on the front page, “Does this look like I wasn’t in trouble being on the front page of a newspaper? Or sitting in a courtroom, charges pending against me?”

By that point, Watts said police already had discovered the baby in the trap of the toilet as her family had to wait outside in the garage as an investigation was now underway.

“I spent a few days in the hospital because I had to have a procedure to remove the placenta because when I came there with only a partial placenta after my membrane rupture and I had lost all my amniotic fluid,” Watts said.

After the fetus was released from the coroner’s office, she had to call the funeral home to get the remains of what she found out was her son.

“I never got to learn that prior,” Watts said, further stating, “A lot was taken from me throughout this process. Mind you I had also been trying to keep things hush until I got comfortable with the realization of bringing a child into this world.”

Her recovery didn’t last long before a phone call her mother received that changed everything.

“My mother was trying to wake me up and that’s when she told me there was a warrant out for my arrest,” she said.

With police waiting outside, Watts was taken to Warren Municipal Court for an arraignment on a single charge of abuse of a corpse but Watts said she had not been fingerprinted or formally booked during the process as she was handcuffed awaiting her chance to plead not guilty, which she did on Oct. 5.

Timko was in the courtroom, eventually becoming Watts’ legal counsel. By that point, Watts was unaware of how widespread her story would become, making its way to TikTok and Instagram.

Seventy long days later, Watts clutched a microphone as she stood at Courthouse Square declaring to a crowd of 150 people that she planned to continue fighting so other women don’t end up in her position.

“Whether you’re black, white or rich or poor, a miscarriage is going to happen so I want people to be treated equally. No matter what side of the tracks you live on, you’re a woman that still deserves to get the health care you need,” Watts said.

cmcbride@tribtoday.com