Retired NYPD detective reunites with mother of slain newborn on anniversary of baby’s death

There are some cases where a detective sticks with him long after leaving the job.

Retired NYPD Det. Christine Casilla, brutal October The death of a 3-month-old newborn baby in the Bronx in 2014, by a caregiver who slammed the baby’s head twice against a bedpost, is an event that still haunts him.

“It was terrible,” Casilla, now 49, told The Post. “It broke my heart.”

Casilla was one of the first to respond to the call of a barely breathing baby at Presbyterian Hospital.

“The baby had a skull fracture from one side of his ear to the other,” said Casilla, who retired in 2020 and lives in Orange County. “He was on life support for a while.”

“After a while, it was determined that there was no brain activity.”

Baby Joemill was removed from life support on November 5, 2014.

“The day they took him off life support, my mom gave me a little Ziploc bag with a piece of his hair in it,” Casilla recalled.

Since then, Casilla and her mother, Barbara Greer, have been in contact. At one point, Greer asked Casilla if she could retrieve the blanket her baby was swaddled in, but the detective couldn’t find it.

When they met at the cemetery where the boy was buried on October 27, the ninth anniversary of Joemill’s tragic coup, Casilla gave him a replica of the blanket he had found on eBay.

“I wasn’t expecting anything like this,” Greer said. “I was just waiting to see him. I went down to the ground and he came with me.”

“We were both crying.”

Greer moved to the Big Apple from Puerto Rico in 2014 when she told Casilla she had to go to work and was waiting for her then-boyfriend’s sister to watch Joemill.

However, her sister called Greer and asked if it was okay for her husband to look after the baby instead.

The mother felt she had no choice.

She was new to the city and needed a factory job to keep the one-bedroom apartment where she lived with her boyfriend, the baby’s father, and her daughter.

“When I got home, unfortunately, my son was lying in my bed,” the mother told The Post, recalling the unimaginable tragedy as vividly as if it were yesterday.

“He said, ‘I was burping and he hit his head on one of the bedposts,'” Greer recalled through tears. “Then he said, ‘He hit him on the other side of his head.’ “My son was covered up as if he didn’t want us to see what was being done.”

The mother lifted the covers and saw that Joemill’s face and body had turned blue. He immediately jumped into his car and took the newborn to the hospital.

The police, including Casilla, came to the hospital and arrested Luis Cartagena, who was responsible for looking after the baby.

Greer said she began to cry that night when she met Casilla, who offered heartfelt words of compassion to the grieving mother.

“When I first saw it, I started crying,” said Greer, now 42.

Casilla said Cartagena’s story kept changing as cops pressed him for answers, so he went into detective mode and watched hours of security footage of his mother’s building.

“(Cartagena) said he didn’t know what happened,” Casilla recalled. “I watched eight or nine hours of video and no one entered the apartment. He never went out.”

He eventually took the blame and pleaded guilty to attempted second-degree murder. He was sentenced to 18 years in prison.

Cartagena, now 42, is serving his sentence at the Eastern Penitentiary in Ulster County, with a release date of 2030, according to state records.

Casilla said about the sentence: “I wish it had been longer.” “This was bad. “The baby had a skull fracture from one side of his ear to the other.”

Today, Greer lives in Massachusetts and has a 6-year-old son. Her daughter is an adult.

“My point in telling this is to ask other mothers to follow their own instincts,” Greer told The Post. “If you feel like you don’t want to go to work or you don’t trust that person, do what you have to do, stay home.”

“I’ll live with this forever.”