Retired NYPD detective, mother of murdered newborn, reunited on anniversary of baby’s death

There are cases that stay with a detective long after his discharge.

For retired NYPD Det. Christine Casilla, the brutal October The 2014 murder of a three-month-old newborn in the Bronx — by a caregiver who slammed the baby’s head twice against a bedpost — is the case that still haunts her.

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

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

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

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

The baby, Joemill, was taken off life support on November 5, 2014.

“The day they took him off the ventilator, the mother gave me a little ziplock bag with a little piece of his hair in it,” Casilla remembers.

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

When they met on October 27, on the tenth anniversary of Joemill’s tragic beating, at the cemetery where the boy is buried, Casilla gave her a replica of the blanket she had found on eBay.

“I didn’t expect anything like that,” Greer said. ‘I just expected to see her. I went all the way to the ground and she came with me.

“We were both crying.”

Greer had recently moved to the Big Apple from Puerto Rico when she told Casilla she had to go to work and expected her then-boyfriend’s sister to babysit Joemill.

But the nurse called and asked Greer if it would be okay if her husband would watch the child instead.

The mother felt she had no other choice.

She was new in town and needed her 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 on my bed,” the mother told The Post, vividly remembering the unimaginable tragedy as if it were yesterday.

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

The mother pulled off the cover and saw that Joemill’s face and body had turned blue. She immediately jumped into her car and rushed the newborn to the hospital.

Officers arriving at the hospital, including Casilla, arrested Luis Cartagena, who was responsible for supervising the baby.

Greer said she burst into tears that evening when she met Casilla, who gave the grieving mother heartfelt words of condolence.

“When I saw her the first time, I just started crying,” Greer, now 42, said.

Cartagena’s story kept changing as police pressed him for answers, Casilla said, so she went into detective mode and watched hours of surveillance footage from the mother’s building.

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

He ultimately committed the crime and pleaded guilty to attempted murder in the second degree. He was sentenced to 18 years in prison.

Cartagena, now 42, remains at the Eastern Correctional Facility in Ulster County with a release date of 2030, state records show.

“I wish it was longer,” Casilla said of the punishment. “This was bad. The baby had a skull fracture from one side of the ear to the other.”

Today, Greer lives in Massachusetts and has a six-year-old son. Her daughter is grown.

“My purpose in saying this is that I want other moms to follow their instincts,” Greer told The Post as she spoke. “If you feel like you don’t want to go to work or you don’t trust that person, do what you need to do and stay home.”

“I will live with this forever.”