GWINNETT COUNTY, Ga. — A 21-year-old who told police she never knew she was pregnant gave birth alone at home and walked into a Gwinnett County hospital with a newborn who wasn’t breathing. Now she’s charged with murder in his death.
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Channel 2 Gwinnett County bureau chief Matt Johnson reports that Devin Lansing faces charges of second-degree murder and second-degree cruelty to children in the death of her son, who was born Sept. 10 and died a month later. Chief Magistrate Judge Kristina Hammer Blum sent both charges forward at a preliminary hearing Tuesday.
Lansing’s attorney, Sandra Gerald, spent much of the hearing questioning Gwinnett County police Detective Ryan Palmeri, who brought the charges, about a birth he didn’t witness.
“So I’m assuming you’re male, you’ve never given birth. Correct?” Gerald asked.
“I have not,” Palmeri answered.
Palmeri testified that Lansing gave birth in her Walther Boulevard apartment around 1:30 a.m., cut the umbilical cord without clamping it and never called 911.
Hospital cameras show her pulling into the Northside Gwinnett Hospital lot around 2:30 a.m. and taking time to fix how her car sat before carrying the baby inside in a gray towel, he said.
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Gerald zeroed in on that gap.
“You believe that she should have called 911 instead of getting her baby into the car and driving to the hospital that was 1.6 miles from her home?” Gerald asked.
“I believe she should have called EMS, yes,” Palmeri said.
Under her questioning, Palmeri said his information on the cause of death came from nurses and a nurse practitioner, not a doctor he was certain had examined the baby. A preliminary autopsy found hemorrhaging in the umbilical cord, he said, but the full report isn’t back.
At one point the judge warned the exchange was “getting a little argumentative.”
Lansing pressed her hands to her face and rocked in her seat through parts of the hearing.
Gerald argued Lansing’s choices in the hour after the birth should be weighed against what she endured alone in her bathtub.
“She had just given birth,” Gerald said. “I mean, we know what it’s like to do. We know the trauma to the body. And she saw there were issues with the baby, she put him in the car, she took him to the hospital.”
Lansing first told officers she didn’t know she was pregnant. Palmeri said that changed five days after the birth, when he read her phone searches back to her and laid out what police found in her apartment.
“Miss Lansing then admitted she had found out she was pregnant, she said around the third or fourth week of August,” Palmeri said. “And then she said she had taken the abortion pill shortly after she had moved into her apartment.”
Palmeri testified that hospital records show a similar birth in November 2025, when Lansing also said she didn’t know she was pregnant. He believes it was in Cherokee County but hasn’t verified it. The hearing didn’t address what became of that child.
Prosecutor Scott Estes pointed to that history.
“It’s disingenuous to make these arguments that she’s a naive 21-year-old who wasn’t aware of how pregnancy worked when she’d given birth less than a year before,” Estes said.
Judge Hammer Blum noted the hearing relied largely on hearsay and said experts will likely weigh in.
“These cases often come down to a determination of 12 people deciding whether it’s criminal negligence,” Hammer Blum said.
Lansing has been in jail since Sept. 23. Her bond motion is pending in Gwinnett County Superior Court.
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