Baby Nikolaii died with 67 broken bones. Now these same bones may exonerate the only father he ever knew.

But the next day, coroners counted at least 67 broken bones in the baby's rib cage and legs. There were so many fractures, and such severe damage underneath the fractures, that Nikolaii's death was ruled a blunt-force homicide. His mother's teenaged boyfriend, the last person to care for him, was charged with murder.

But new defense evidence strongly suggests that the baby's injuries — many of them days, even months old — are the result of significant metabolic bone disease.

Now, those same tiny, shattered bones may exonerate the boyfriend, a young man from Brooklyn, New York, named Quincy Pierre, the only father Nikolaii ever knew.

"There's doubt about whether the injuries on this child were abuse at all," defense attorney Sam Roberts said at a court appearance last month.

Nikolaii suffered from a "perfect storm" of medical conditions, Roberts now believes.

Born with his umbilical cord around his neck, he had to be resuscitated in the delivery room, and continued through his short life to suffer severe brain damage, seizures, and cerebral palsy, medical records reviewed by Insider show.

Meanwhile, Nikolaii's bones, preserved as evidence since his death in 2019, show that undiagnosed bone disease was slowly robbing his skeleton of calcium and vitamin D, two teams of forensic pathologists hired by the defense have found.

By the time he died, Nikolaii's bones were so fragile, that even routine handling could cause fractures, the defense pathologists believe. The leg massages that family members were taught to give by doctors, to stretch and soothe his rope-tight, palsied muscles, put the baby at an even higher risk of breaks, they say.

But Nikolaii's cerebral palsy had dimmed his pain response. So he suffered in silence, failing to cry even when he received his routine vaccination shots ten days before his death, medical records show.

Despite the scores of doctors who tended to the fragile infant, no one realized his skeleton was slowly crumbling inside him.

'He stepped up to help'

Breeona Major gave birth to Llord Nikolaii Corbin Major in a Bronx hospital on July 7, 2019. His father, Major's ex-boyfriend, wasn't there for the very sick baby, the defense has said in court papers. But Pierre was.

For three weeks, the young couple sat with "Niko," as both their families called him, in the neo-natal intensive care unit of Manhattan's Bellevue Hospital. Major was 17, with a dazzling smile. Pierre had just turned 19, and was soft spoken, tall and thin.

"Breeona was there three times, four times a day," at the NICU, family friend Migdalia Guzman told Insider. "Quincy was with her."

Pierre used money he earned doing freelance web development and IT support to buy baby clothes, a stroller, diapers and formula, according to an unsuccessful bail application from last year.

"Breeona was Quincy's first love" going back two years prior to high school in the Bronx, when she walked up to him in the hallway and asked for his phone number, the bail application says.

Pierre's own father wasn't around, he told his lawyer, and he'd spent a year of his childhood in a homeless shelter.

"I knew what it was like to grow up in poverty," the bail application quotes him saying. "And I knew I was in a position to help."

"Despite the fact that he was not Nikollaii's actual father, and that he had no financial or legal obligation toward Breeona or her son, Quincy fully supported Breonna through her pregnancy and the birth," the bail application says, using an alternate spelling of the baby's name.

"He stepped up to help her raise a severely disabled son who was not biologically his own," it adds. "This is demonstrative of Quincy's heart and his values."

Nikolaii comes home

"Quincy was very excited when Nikolai was able to come home from the hospital on August 2, 2019," last year's bail application says, using yet another alternate spelling of the baby's first name, which is "Nikolaii" on his birth certificate and autopsy.

When Nikolaii left the NICU, Major, who lived with her grandmother in the Bronx, was the primary caregiver, but the baby sometimes stayed with Pierre, who lived with his mother and two little brothers in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn.

At her house and his, "Quincy would help care for and feed Nikolai, and give him medicine that his doctors had prescribed," the defense lawyer, Roberts, wrote in a December court filing.

A crime scene photo shows a ledge in Pierre's bedroom stocked with the baby's medications, diapers and formula. Another shows the inside of his bedroom door, where Pierre taped photographs of Nikolaii and Breeona, whom he called "Bree" and "my girl."

Nikolaii would be home from the hospital for only seven weeks before his death. In that time, he was seen by doctors once a week on average, either by appointment or in emergency care visits, medical records show.

"He was a very, very tense baby," remembered Guzman, the mom's family friend. "And quiet. He didn't cry like a normal baby."

Family members on both sides would massage Nikolaii's legs, Guzman said, to try to relieve his constricted muscles.

The baby rarely cried, Pierre's mother, Judith Pierre, told Insider. Instead, he would tremble.

"Every time I tried to bathe him or hug him, he would shake," she remembered as she fought back tears after her son's last court date last month.

"I think in his own way, he was telling me he was in pain."

'Even I could see the fractures'

Checking for pneumonia, doctors ordered X-rays of Nikolaii's chest. Two of these images were emailed to an off-site radiologist in California, who found the baby's lungs were clear. Nikolaii was sent home with a prescription for Tylenol.

Two years would pass before the hospital shared these two x-ray images with Roberts, Pierre's attorney, in response to a defense subpoena.

"I'm not a radiologist, but even I could see there were fractures" in Nikolaii's rib cage, Roberts told Insider. Key among these fractures was a compound break located five ribs down from the baby's right shoulder.

A piece of this fifth rib had separated from the rib cage, said Roberts, who works for the Legal Aid Society's Homicide Defense Task Force.

"That rib injury is critical," Roberts said. "Because it's right above Nikolaii's lacerated liver, which was probably the cause of death."

Hospital records, also obtained by the defense, show that during this same visit, Nikolaii had an elevated level of a liver enzyme, a possible indicator of organ damage.

"In fairness, they weren't looking for broken bones. They were looking for pneumonia," Roberts said of the Bronx doctors and California radiologist.

"But at least four days before his death, the baby – now we know – had lots of fractures," including directly above the injuries that ended his life.

Nikolaii's last 24 hours

Nikolai's last day alive was September 26, 2019, a Thursday.

Three days had passed since his Bronx hospital visit. He still wasn't feeling well. This time, his mother took him to his doctors at Bellevue, where he'd spent the first three weeks of his life.

"My girl, she's saying she went to the doctor with the baby," Pierre would tell police, describing how she called him from Bellevue that afternoon, according to an NYPD confession tape reviewed by Insider. "He has a fever. They gave her some medicine."

He remembered that she dropped the baby off at his family's apartment in Brooklyn later that afternoon. "We talk a while," he said. "And then she leaves."

Pierre told police he spent the day feeding Nikolaii his bottles, giving him his new Tylenol prescription every four hours, and playing video games or working on a laptop while watching the baby nap on the bed next to him.

Nikolaii seemed restless that night; Pierre's mother told police of trying to burp and calm the baby at around midnight. But Nikolaii – Pierre calls him "homie" at one point in the interrogation, and "my son" and "my boy" at other points – mostly slept.

Pierre fell asleep at 3 AM, he told police, still sounding shell shocked a day after the death.

"And then, I wake up at six, and I see that his face is pale. And I like lift him up. He has like, no consciousness, like his arms is not tense how they usually are tense," the 19-year-old remembered.

Pierre told cops that the boy was only breathing every six or seven seconds, describing what doctors would later call "agonal" breathing, the involuntary gasping triggered when the heart stops beating.

Pierre called Major, then 911, then Major again. He tried breathing into Nikolaii's mouth. He held Nikolaii upright against his headboard, he told cops, and tried to shake him back to life.

"UPON ARRIVAL, C/V WAS LAYING ON THE FATHER'S BED NOT BREATHING AND PURPLE," according to a police report from that morning, referring to Nikolaii by the initials for "Complainant/Victim."

The baby was in cardiac arrest, paramedics would later tell an investigator with the New York City medical examiner's office.

In a box on the report labled "Child Abuse Suspected," an NYPD lieutenant wrote "NO."

Despite continued CPR and intravenous epinephrine, emergency room doctors at Wyckoff Heights Medical Center in Brooklyn could not revive Nikolaii.

His mother had just reached the hospital from her home in the Bronx when the baby was pronounced dead at 7:20 a.m.

"My baby! My baby died!" Guzman, the family friend, recalled Major crying during a call from the hospital. "And then she started just screaming like crazy over the phone."

Major was too distraught to speak to police and doctors or to fill out any forms, according to paperwork in the case file. She has not responded to Insider's attempts to reach her by phone or through Guzman.

A legal investigator for the Medical Examiner's Office noted, pre-autopsy, that there was a small, crescent-shaped bruise on the baby's right inner thigh that may have been caused during resuscitation. Otherwise, there were "no injuries or wounds seen."

"There were no signs of trauma or anything to the body," Det. John Weinum, who would lead the NYPD murder investigation, recalled during a hearing in October 2022.

Nikolaii's autopsy

Pathologists disagree on how many broken rib and leg bones Nikolaii suffered. The pathologists hired by Pierre's lawyers cited 118, a number that double-counts new re-fractures of previous breaks. The New York City medical examiner's office stopped counting at 67.

"There were over 60 fractures to the right and left ribs," according to the autopsy report. Only the 12th, or bottom-most ribs, right and left, remained unbroken.

"Numerous" rib fractures showed no signs of healing, meaning they were recent, according to the autopsy report. "Additional" fractures showed initial signs of healing. At least five rib fractures showed the kind of healing that takes two to six weeks to form.

The autopsy does note "some" healing and "possible" healing in the fractures seen in that critically significant fifth right rib, the fractures which may be involved in the lethal injuries to Nikolaii's liver.

There were a minimum of seven fractures throughout Nikolai's legs.

The autopsy notes two internal injuries, both bleeding at the time of death.

There is the liver injury underneath Nikolaii's fractured right ribs. This injury was at least four days old, the defense believes, citing the Bronx hospital X-ray. And there is a small area of bleeding on the brain, at the top of the baby's head. The defense believes this is new damage to a brain injury Nikolaii suffered at birth.

Neither injury can be fixed to the ten hours Nikolaii was in Pierre's care, the defense believes, and either may have been caused or worsened by efforts to revive the dying baby.

"The OCME has nothing further to report from the original cause and manner of death," Mark Desire, assistant director of forensic biology for the medical examiner's office told Insider in an email, when asked for comment on the case. "We stand by our determination."

The confession of Quincy Pierre

It was with these horrific autopsy results newly in hand that two NYPD detectives interrogated Pierre for five hours on September 28, 2019, the day after the baby's death.

Weinum, the lead detective, appears on the videotaped interview wearing a white shirt and no jacket. Det. Alexander Grandstaff, of the NYPD's Brooklyn North Homicide Squad, wears a dark suit.

Both repeatedly tell Pierre he is not being truthful with them as he insists, until the interrogation's final half hour, that he'd done nothing to hurt Nikolaii.

"We'll tell you this," Grandstaff tells the teen, midway through. "Your baby had head injuries."

"He already had head injuries," Pierre answers. "From when he was born."

"Was his head hitting anything?" Grandstaff asks again, as Pierre describes trying to revive the dying baby. "Did it bang on the headboard a little bit?"

"No. No, it didn't," Pierre protests.

"What could happen to break bones in a baby laying on a bed?" Weinum asks at another point.

"Are you saying that his bones was broken?" Pierre asks back, sounding distressed.

At a key point, the teen remembers that sometime around midnight or 1 a.m. on the day Nikolaii died, the baby was extra fussy, and refused to eat. Something was not "right" with the baby's chest.

"I felt it right here," Pierre tells the detectives, toward the end of the interrogation, demonstrating by touching the right side of his own chest. "Like, when you push in, like, it can push in, and it's not supposed to push in."

Grandstaff asks Pierre, "So what do you think was up with, like, here, the rib area?"

"It just felt like, like it wasn't together," Pierre tells them. "This part right here, that if you push in, you could feel it," he tries to explain. Maybe, Pierre wonders aloud, he himself "bruised" the baby by touching him there.

"How?" Weinum asked.

"From pushing it like that."

When Pierre wonders if Nikolaii could have been hurt earlier, before that night – "Remember, the baby been to the doctor so many times," he says – the detectives tell him this is impossible, because of "science."

"They said the injuries occurred within three hours of his death," Weinum tells Pierre, contrary to the autopsy, which does not pinpoint times. "Yeah. It's science, dude. It's 100 percent."

When Pierre begs, "Can you just, can you just tell me his injuries?" Weinum answers, "Show me in good faith that you're going to tell us something that you aren't already telling us. And then I'll tell you an injury."

"Yes," Pierre responds, sounding weary.

He goes through the same story of waking to see Nikolaii pale and gasping, of holding the baby up against the headboard, of shaking him for five seconds.

"Tell us something that you haven't told us yet," Weinum demands again.

A 'false' confession

At this point, Pierre's lawyers believe, Pierre begins making a false confession.

"I do get mad," about Nikolaii's condition, he tells the detectives, who keep pressing him about how "frustrated" he must be with his son's condition.

"I understand that," Grandstaff agrees, his voice sympathetic. "It's frustrating."

Pierre then says that in the hours before Nikolaii died, he twisted the baby's legs. He also lifted the baby up with both hands, "turning his body back and forth really fast." And then, he admits, he laid the baby down, lifted his right arm up, and "I was just pushing down on his ribs."

The next moment in the video will certainly be played repeatedly by prosecutors for any eventual jury. Pierre demonstrates what he did to Nikolaii by raising his right arm over his head, and crushing the side of an empty plastic cup with the fingers of his left hand.

The cup collapses easily, and, since it's near a microphone, it makes an excruciatingly loud crackling noise.

"He wasn't crying or anything," Pierre then says of Nikolaii, releasing the cup. "He doesn't cry."

Pierre's lawyer, Roberts, concedes the cup crushing is "not great," as police interrogation moments go. But it must be put into context, he said.

"The confession, by any reasonable legal standard, was involuntary, and if this goes to trial we will certainly litigate that in front of a jury," Roberts told Insider recently. "It's involuntary because of his age, the pressure on him, and the 'evidence' that turned out to be false or was knowingly false," he said. "Such as, 'You must have abused your baby because all those injuries were three hours old.'"

Nikolaii's rib had been fully detached for days," the lawyer said, again citing that Bronx hospital X-ray from four days before the baby died.

"Quincy is saying he's feeling – and alarmed by – this looseness in the baby's rib," he said. "But we know he didn't create it. It was already there for four days, at least."

"We also know that there was extensive CPR done on the baby" in his final moments," Roberts added. "This is compressions on this very tiny baby, with adult hands, trying to get the baby's heart to start. Especially now, given the finding of metabolic bone disease, even properly performed CPR could cause fractures."

Besides, "it's a very flimsy cup," the lawyer noted, returning to that chilling moment in the interrogation. "It doesn't take that much force to crush a plastic cup and elicit that sound from a plastic cup."

A spokesman for the Brooklyn district attorney's office declined to comment, citing the longstanding office policy of not discussing ongoing prosecutions.

Pierre's next court date

Pierre is due back in New York state court in Brooklyn on Friday, when his lawyers will ask again that Pierre be released on bail due to the strength of the new pathology reports.

The reports found Nikolaii suffered from osteopenia and osteomalacia, which cause brittle bones and a high risk of fracture.

Nikolaii's bones were abnormal, "especially in the clinical context of multiple fractures of varying ages in such a young infant," Dr. Jonathan L. Arden, who is based in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, wrote in a recent report shared with Insider.

"Weakened bones in a small, already medically fragile baby are more prone to be fractured through ordinary handling and manipulation of the infant," Arden wrote.

"Especially given his apparent insensitivity to pain," Arden added, "accidental fractures could easily have gone unnoticed by the caregivers for this baby."

Arden's report also addresses the injuries to Nikolaii's liver and brain.

The liver injury "is consistent with having been caused by the same actions that fractured the right ribs" days before his death, Arden wrote. "It cannot be reasonably excluded that if those ribs were fractured accidentally, the underlying liver injury also occurred accidentally."

Arden refers to Nikolaii's brain injury by using the medical term "subdural hemorrhage."

"The fresher subdural hemorrhage represents rebleeding arising from the older, healed and healing subdural hemorrhage" that the baby sustained at birth, Arden wrote.

Last month, a second bone pathology expert, Dr. Evan Matshes, issued his own findings for the defense. High-resolution X-rays of the baby's pelvic bones "demonstrate clear-cut evidence of a loss of bone mass," he wrote in his report. A sample of Nikolaii's blood showed a vitamin D deficiency, also associated with bone disease, he wrote.

"I mean, the real tragedy here is that this baby had all these broken bones for weeks, leading up to the day of his death, and at a time when he was being seen regularly by doctors," Roberts told Insider.

"We know the baby has a diminished, if not entirely muted pain response, and nobody sees any other markers of a baby that's in distress or danger," he said.

"The baby's not malnourished, the baby's not dirty, and Nikolaii himself is not telling them what's wrong."