SCHENECTADY — Upset over an argument with her boyfriend, an angry Persia Nelson grabbed her nearly 11-month-old daughter, swaddled the child in a blanket and stormed off from a Campbell Avenue home into the dark of night on a cold, rainy day last year, Christina Tremante-Pelham told jurors Wednesday during opening statements in Nelson’s murder and manslaughter trial inside a Schenectady County courtroom.
The chief homicide prosecutor contends that Nelson is captured on surveillance cameras clutching the child while walking through the streets in the Bellevue neighborhood before eventually making her way into a heavily wooded area and emerging onto the General Electric campus.
While Tremante-Pelham and defense attorney Mark Sacco both agree that Nelson had earlier drank alcohol and smoked marijuana at a party, they offered vastly different versions of the sequence of events on the night of March 10, 2024, and the defendant’s state of mind at the time she allegedly left baby Halo Branton on the GE campus and walked off…