A 23-year-old girl has claimed that her decision to take an ancestry DNA test may have helped police solve the 27-year-old Baby Garnet case, sending her grandmother to jail. In a video on TikTok, Jenna Rose Gerwatowski talked about the murder mystery, saying she took the DNA test a few years ago because it seemed “dope,” The New York Post reported.
Ms Gerwatowski said she didn’t know her decision would end up sending her grandmother to jail.
“Little did I know,” Jenna said with a chuckle and later cut the video to how a year after she was called by a detective from the Michigan State Police at work.
“I was like, ‘Excuse me? What the f*** did I do?’ So I start freaking out,” she recalled.
However, once she met the cop she was informed that he had re-opened a 1997 cold case, adding her DNA was a “direct match to the victim of this case”.
Ms Gerwatowski was shocked to find the police officer was talking about Baby Garnet, a “term or near-term” newborn found dead in an outhouse at Garnet Lake Campground in Michigan’s Naubinway.
Later, DNA testing was carried out, and it confirmed that Ms Gerwatowski’s mother was linked directly to the child. This means it had to be related to “my mom’s mother,” she said about Nancy Gerwatoswki, 61, whom she claimed to have never met.
“I was mind blown,” she said, adding her grandmother was the person police was looking for the past 25 years. “It’s all because of an Ancestry DNA kit,” she said.
Nancy Gerwatoswki was arrested in 2022 and charged with murder, involuntary manslaughter and concealing the death of an individual. She even admitted to being Baby Garnet’s mother.
She may have given birth to the child at home, while the newborn died of asphyxiation. Later, she left the body in the outhouse. The prosecutors in the case argued the newborn child might have been saved if medical help had been sought.
Nancy Gerwatowski was released in October last year on a personal recognizance bond, while she was ordered to comply with GPS monitoring and home confinement. If convicted, she might get a life sentence.
