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Raeshonn Corbo, a 30-year-old former Norfolk State University basketball player living in northern New Jersey, was charged with first-degree aggravated manslaughter, aggravated assault and child endangerment.
The children’s father, Jonathan Melendez, has been awaiting trial on similar charges.
Corbo was taken into custody on Thursday, Oct. 20, after a grand jury in Hackensack returned an indictment alleging that she "was also responsible for the assault and death" of one of the children, Bergen County Prosecutor Mark Musella said.
Corbo brought the infants to Hackensack University Medical Center on Oct. 23, 2019 with leg, clavicle and rib fractures, as well as head trauma that included brain bleeding, authorities said at the time.
The injuries were caused sometime after the boy and girl were born in early September, investigators said.
The infant who died had been unresponsive, had bleeding on the brain and was initially listed in critical condition, Musella said at the time.
The baby was pronounced dead six days later, he said.
Melendez, a television production worker, had lived with Corbo in a subsidized apartment on West Passaic Street before moving to the Grand Concourse, law enforcement sources said.
Detectives said he told them during a six-hour interview that he may have “squeezed [the infants] too hard” because they’d been “crying too much,” documents on file in Superior Court in Hackensack show.
Melendez spent nearly two weeks in the Bergen County Jail before a judge released him, with conditions, pending trial.
Corbo, who is unemployed, had been a star basketball player at Paramus Catholic High School more than a decade ago. She went on to play at Norfolk State University in Virginia.
She remained held in the Bergen County Jail on Friday while awaiting a first appearance in Central Judicial Processing Court in Hackensack.
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