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Couple struggling with death of their son

Matt Mason and Andrea Merritt hold a picture of 4-month-old Nicholas Merritt, who died Oct. 27 of SIDS. Nicholas is wearing his monkey Halloween costume that, because of his death, he didn’t wear on beggars night.

Staff photo by Rick McCrabb Matt Mason and Andrea Merritt hold a picture of 4-month-old Nicholas Merritt, who died Oct. 27 of SIDS. Nicholas is wearing his monkey Halloween costume that, because of his death, he didn’t wear on beggars night.

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By Rick McCrabb, Columnist Updated 10:00 PM Friday, November 6, 2009

Andrea Merritt finally had her life together.

She had moved from Cincinnati — where she was a high school dropout and a frequent inmate in juvenile detention — to Middletown to be closer to her family and friends.

She gave birth to her first child, Nicholas Merritt, on July 3, 2009, and on Oct. 23 — her 19th birthday — accepted the wedding proposal from Matt Mason, 22, of Middletown.

Those celebrations turned to tears four days later — a blink of the eye — when her life crashed down.

On the afternoon of Oct. 27, Nicholas, sleeping in his crib, suffocated on his blanket, according to the Warren County Coroner’s Office. Andrea and Matt tried reviving Nicholas, but, by the time paramedics transported him to Atrium Medical Center, he was dead.

From mother to mourner.

“I didn’t want to believe it was real,” Andrea said recently while sitting on her aunt’s front porch on Garfield Street. “It was like a bad dream. I thought I’d wake up and he’d be sitting on my lap.”

Instead, Andrea and Matt, who’s not Nicholas’ biological father, said their goodbyes to Nicholas in the hospital.

Nicholas was buried last week at Woodside Cemetery and his arrangements were handled by Breitenbach-McCoy-Leffler Funeral Home. Because Andrea stayed at home with her son, she had no insurance to cover his burial expenses.

The City of Middletown, through its indigent program, paid the $505 to the funeral home for the family. Now Andrea and Matt are hoping to collect enough donations to pay the city back.

But right now, they’re more concerned about repairing their lives.

Andrea, who dropped out of North College High School when she was a 16-year-old sophomore, said along with motherhood came maturity. She was president of the Me Generation.

Pregnancy flipped her priorities.

“It was a visible difference,” said Heather Merritt, Andrea’s aunt. “We could see it all around her.”

Andrea grabbed a tissue from her aunt, and said the birth of Nicholas — nicknamed “Pop-Tart” because his gender wasn’t known — forced her to grow up.

“He put me second,” she said. “I wasn’t a kid anymore. I was responsible for him 24/7. I had to feed him, change him, take care of him.”

Contact this

columnist

at (513) 705-2842 or rmccrabb@coxohio.com.

How to help:

If you want to help defray the cost of Nicholas Merritt’s funeral and burial, make a check payable to City of Middletown and drop it off in the city’s health department. Because of indigent services, the bill is $505, according to city officials.

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