IT IS SAID THERE ARE ONLY A FEW TRULY CRUCIAL JUNCTURES IN any life. Take a misstep at such a moment, and it will shape all the rest of your journey. Brian Peterson Jr., 18, took such a step in the early morning hours of Tuesday, Nov. 12. Nine days later, evidence that he had chosen poorly lay stretched out behind and before him. On that day, outside the office of the FBI in Wilmington, Del., he and his parents, Brian Peterson Sr. and Barbara Zuchowski, lace a gauntlet of camera crews, police and angry onlookers. Reporters shouted questions; Peterson didn't react, his face frozen between apprehension and terror. Then a single cry went up: "Baby killer!" He stiffened visibly, his mother began to weep, and, as children in danger have done for all time, Peterson clutched tightly to his mother for dear life.

It was a scene few could have imagined and no one would have wished for. Peterson, a freshman at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania, and Amy Grossberg, 18, a freshman at the University of Delaware—both well-to-do, clean-scrubbed kids—stood accused of murdering their newborn son and leaving his body in a trash bin behind a motel—a crime that prosecutors in the case say could be punishable by death.

More than 1,300 children are murdered every year with far less public outcry, but this death tore at hearts everywhere. "This happens all the time," says Richard Gelles, director of the University of Rhode Island's Family Violence Research Program. "What doesn't happen all the time is that the offenders are teenage college students from affluent families."

"I don't understand how anyone could do this," says Kelly Ford, 19, a sophomore at the University of Delaware. "We have a Planned Parenthood. We have all sorts of counseling on campus." Adds sophomore Neila Cunningham, 19: "They had so many different options, and they picked the worst one possible."

Peterson and Grossberg, both being held without bail on charges of first-degree murder, might well have escaped detection had it not been for a twist of medical fate. At around 5:30 p.m. on Tuesday, Nov. 12, Grossberg collapsed in her room on the second floor of Thompson Hall, a nondescript brick freshman dorm on the University of Delaware campus in Newark. Within minutes, paramedics arrived and took her to nearby Christiana Hospital, where, according to a later police affidavit, doctors determined that she had given birth to a baby, "possibly delivered within the last 12 hours." Only after doctors told Grossberg that the placenta had not yet been expelled from her body did she admit that she had had a baby.

Grossberg's roommate Holly Shooman, who had accompanied her to the hospital, told police in the emergency room that Amy's boyfriend, Brian Peterson, had picked up Grossberg after midnight and that the couple had returned later in the day. A search of Grossberg's dorm room turned up bloodied clothes and sheets, and police scoured campus trash bins looking for the baby.

Questioned by college officials and Gettysburg police, who had been alerted by authorities in Newark, Peterson reportedly broke down and admitted that he had put the baby in a garbage bin outside an unspecified hotel in the Newark area. Just after 5 a.m. the next day, authorities, using a police "cadaver" dog, found the dead newborn in a gray plastic bag in a receptacle outside the Comfort Inn on South College Avenue. An autopsy performed by the state medical examiner showed that the infant, a 6-lb., 2-oz. boy, had been born healthy and had died as the result of multiple skull fractures and having been shaken.

As word spread, some Delaware students said they had believed Gross-berg, a popular, outgoing girl with a passion for art, was pregnant. Others, including friends, said the petite freshman, who weighs just over 100 pounds, had shown no signs that she was expecting. Yet even those who suspected deferred to her privacy. "Everybody knew," says student Bryan Molnar, 18, who lived on Grossberg's floor. "But it wasn't our place to confront her about it."

There was little, if anything, in either of their backgrounds to explain why Peterson and Grossberg chose not to tell their parents of the pregnancy, or put the baby up for adoption, or just leave him on the steps of a hospital to be recovered. Grossberg had until recently lived in a sprawling, $900,000 Tudor home on two acres in the upscale town of Franklin Lakes, N.J., with her father, Alan, a furniture-store owner, and mother, Sonye, an interior designer. At Ramapo High School, Grossberg (who has an older brother, Jason) was widely regarded as a model teenager. "I can't imagine Amy being in this situation in a million years," Pat McLaughlin, the mother of a teenage friend, told the Bergen Record. "She was bright. She was intelligent. She was friendly. They were a lovely, lovely family."

Peterson came from an equally privileged family. An only child, he grew up on New York's Long Island. At 12, after his parents divorced, he went to live in a Wyckoff, N.J., mansion with his mother, Barbara, who runs a thriving video company with her second husband, John Zuchowski. (Peterson's father, also remarried, still lives in Dix Hills, N.Y.) Popular at Ramapo High, Peterson was cocaptain of the soccer team. Like Grossberg, he seemed a levelheaded, solid student, who knuckled down to his books at Gettysburg and seemed eager to become a starter on the school's soccer team. "You kind of see personality traits during the season," says Gettysburg soccer coach David Wright. "He was not the kind of kid you expect to see in any kind of trouble."

Grossberg and Peterson started dating in their junior year at Ramapo High. By all accounts they were devoted to each other. This past summer, at a time when she must clearly have been aware of her pregnancy, Grossberg worked as a counselor for the Wyckoff YMCA, teaching art and supervising about 10 5-year-old girls. "She was very good with the kids," one senior counselor, Sean McInnes, told the Bergen Record. Peterson spent much of his summer playing golf. In the evenings the young couple often went to pool parties at the Indian Trail Club, where Grossberg's parents were members. At no time does anyone recall their betraying the slightest anxiety or preoccupation, though by the end of the summer Grossberg was already well along in her pregnancy.

Their relationship continued almost uninterrupted once college started. During the week, they spoke by phone every night, and Grossberg often ducked out while visiting friends in the dorm to check her answering machine. Many weekends, Peterson drove the two hours to Newark. "He really seemed to love her a lot," says Andrew Zankel, 18, who lived in Grossberg's dorm. "They were always in there, sitting on the bed together, hugging."

Meanwhile nature was taking its course. Not long after midnight on Nov. 12, Grossberg called Peterson with news they had both surely been dreading: her water had broken. The baby was on its way. Peterson immediately drove his Toyota to the Newark campus, where he picked up his girlfriend and headed into the night. At the Comfort Inn just off Interstate 95, they took a $52-a-night room. "I think she just denied [the pregnancy] to herself, and then things started to happen," says a friend of Grossberg's from the Delaware campus. "I think she got scared. He panicked, she panicked."

But to one friend of Peterson's father, who knew Brian well, the notion that high expectations could cloud judgment just as effectively as low self-esteem was not that hard to imagine. As a 17-year-old from a middle-class family, this woman too had become pregnant by accident, which allowed her to sympathize—up to a point—with the sense of desperation that must have gripped the two teenagers. "You just keep putting off telling your parents day by day," says the woman, who was seven months pregnant when her mother and father found out—and then decided to keep the baby. "My parents had a very, very high opinion of me. It wasn't that I didn't love them. I couldn't disappoint them."

Peterson and Grossberg cannot count on that sort of understanding from prosecutors, who announced with almost unseemly haste that they would be seeking the death penalty. Police arrested Grossberg as soon as she was discharged from the hospital. Peterson was held briefly in Gettysburg, but because Delaware authorities had not yet brought charges, he was released. When Delaware police learned the baby was born healthy and then killed, they demanded Peterson turn himself in.

Instead he spent several days holed up with his mother and father in hotel rooms near Wilmington. His lawyer Joseph Hurley, a respected criminal-defense specialist in Delaware, acknowledges that Peterson's mother entertained some momentary fantasies about spiriting her son out of the country. "They're going to kill my son. It's my only born son," Hurley said Barbara Zuchowski told him. "How do I turn over my son to die?"

Ultimately, he says, the family realized that there was no real alternative to surrender, though his mother is still in agony. "She feels she has blood on her hands for doing this," says Hurley. Grossberg's attorney released a statement reading, in part: "Amy is a good kid who has deserved the love and support of her parents.... We believe that when the facts are properly developed, the state and public will agree with us that Amy committed no crime."

How serious the authorities will be in pursuing the death penalty is an open question. Delaware leads the country in executions per capita, with three men put to death so far this year, including one by hanging. All the same, the death penalty is rarely used in such cases involving teenage parents. More likely, prosecutors are hoping to pressure Grossberg and Peterson into copping a plea. "I suspect that unless there's a grandstanding district attorney involved," says family-violence expert Gelles, "there will be a plea bargain, with them serving perhaps 5 to 10 years."

Almost lost amid the debate over the accused was the fate of the tiniest victim. For several days the remains of Baby Boy Grossberg, as the infant was known in morgue records, went unclaimed. Last week the Grossberg family came forward, quietly and sadly, to take the body, promising to give it a proper burial.

BILL HEWITT
ALICIA BROOKS in Newark, MARIA EFTIMIADES in Wyckoff, ANTHONY DUIGNAN-CABRERA in Gettysburg, STEPHEN SAWICKI in Boston and HELENE STAPINSKI on Long Island