The Danbury woman accused of killing her newborn son by leaving him in a dumpster in 2018 returned to court Friday following a motion by the state to collect her DNA.

Dominique Harrison, 28, appeared in Danbury Superior Court charged with murder with special circumstances, the most serious homicide charge in Connecticut.

Judge Sean McGuinness granted the prosecution's request for DNA, which Harrison's attorney did not object to. McGuinness also added that Harrison was not to be interrogated during the swabbing, which an evidence collector did at the courthouse after the hearing.

Both sides also discussed the status of the discovery process and said the defense should have all of the prosecution's evidence soon.

"The device I dropped off today - I was requested to drop off a 1 terabyte. Apparently it's voluminous, the amount of discovery still to come," said attorney Gene Zingaro, who represents Harrison.

Harrison is being held on a $2.5 million bond and returns to court Nov. 16.

She was arrested in June, nearly eight years after workers at City Carting in Stamford discovered a dead baby boy at the trash and recycling facility in October 2018. Police said at the time that the child's body had been brought there by one of the many trucks dumping trash and recyclables daily.

The case had no leads until October 2023, according to Harrison's arrest warrant, when police got a tip the baby could be related to a family in the Danbury-Bethel area. The warrant said investigators spent the next two years doing ancestry research, DNA comparisons and forensic analysis to identify the baby's father, which was confirmed through testing a cigarette that police recovered during surveillance of him in November 2025.

Investigators then used the man's public Facebook profile to identify Harrison as one of two women he was dating in 2018. The warrant said surveillance of Harrison led investigators to test a straw she threw out in December 2025, which confirmed she was the newborn's mother.

Detectives interviewed Harrison several times between March 31 and June 17, according to the warrant, which said Harrison initially told police she "never had a kid," then admitted to the pregnancy but said she hid it from her family and the baby's father. According to the warrant, she eventually told police she delivered the baby alive in a bathtub when no one in her family was home on Oct. 12, 2018.

The warrant said she later confessed to leaving her son in a remote dumpster behind a shopping plaza on Backus Avenue while he was still alive. She told police the child was still moving and “not crying as much” when she disposed of him, per the warrant.

Police believe the newborn died when he and the contents of the dumpster were loaded into a recycling truck, then compacted, before being brought to City Carting.

It's unclear where a separate investigation involving Harrison stands. At Harrison's arraignment on June 22, Assistant State's Attorney Mary-Caitlin Harding said additional serious charges could be filed in the future. Court documents obtained by News 12 suggests that investigation focuses on a second pregnancy.

According to a search warrant, Harrison said a visit to Planned Parenthood in September 2019 confirmed she was pregnant, then in November, she gave birth to the baby at home one night while her family was asleep. Harrison initially told police she dropped the baby at Danbury Hospital under the Safe Havens Act, per the search warrant, but when confronted with the fact there was no record, Harrison admitted to wrapping the newborn in a white “Snoopy” blanket and putting him in the woods behind her home.

"The baby was alive when she placed him in the wooded area because it was crying,” the search warrant said, but when Harrison returned the next morning at 8:30 a.m., "She knew it was dead because it was not breathing and was a little blue."

Harrison took the baby out of the original blanket, wrapped him in a different one and put him in a recycling dumpster near the front of the home, something she never told anyone about, according to the search warrant. She kept that Snoopy blanket in a plastic bin in the basement, and though she washed it, "believes that there might be a small amount of blood on it," per the search warrant. The document said investigators seized the blanket from Harrison's home after her arrest and sent it to the state forensic lab for testing.

Police renew attention to Safe Havens Act after Danbury woman charged with killing newborn