The death of 3-year-old Makinzlee Handrahan moved from a bedroom in Edgecomb to two courtrooms before jurors convicted Tyler Witham-Jordan in March.
EDGECOMB, Maine — The case that ended this month with Tyler Witham-Jordan’s murder conviction began in a child’s bunk bed on Christmas morning 2022, when Makinzlee Handrahan’s mother called 911 and said she thought her 3-year-old daughter was dead.
From that moment forward, nearly every step in the case carried both urgency and delay: emergency crews rushed to the apartment, investigators collected evidence, the state charged a suspect months later, one trial collapsed without a verdict, and a second jury finally convicted Witham-Jordan of depraved indifference murder on March 3, 2026. The long route mattered because the facts never stopped being brutal, but the legal answer took years to secure.
Emergency responders were sent to the home off Route 1 at about 7:37 a.m. on Dec. 25, 2022. Lewis, the girl’s mother, told dispatchers, “Oh my God, I think my daughter’s dead,” according to reporting based on the call and court records. Investigators said Witham-Jordan could also be heard in the background saying, “I’m f—ed” and “I’m finished.” When responders reached the apartment, they found Makinzlee unresponsive, cold and badly bruised. She was pronounced dead, and her body was taken for examination. The first phase of the case was not a courtroom argument but a death scene: a small apartment, a child in bed, adults inside the home and visible injuries that quickly shifted the matter from unexplained death to homicide investigation.
The next stage came through autopsy findings and crime-scene evidence. The medical examiner concluded that Makinzlee died of blunt force trauma and ruled the death a homicide. Prosecutors later told jurors the child had severe bruising across her face and body and internal bleeding in the abdomen and skull. They said a plastic hairbrush was found broken with a large clump of her hair stuck in it. They also said Witham-Jordan’s DNA appeared under her fingernails and on the waistband of her bloody diaper. Those details gave investigators a theory of what happened before dawn: that the child was beaten on Christmas Eve, placed in the lower bunk and left there until morning.
Only after that evidence was developed did the state frame motive and state of mind. Prosecutors said Witham-Jordan was addicted to opioids, believed he had bought fake drugs on Christmas Eve and was suffering withdrawal symptoms while growing angry with Lewis’s children. They said Makinzlee had been sick in the days before the holiday and that he was especially agitated with her. Defense lawyers did not accept that theory and instead pointed to Lewis as the possible killer. The conflict between those accounts became the center of the courtroom fight, but it arrived after investigators had already built the factual spine of the case through physical evidence and the timeline of the 911 response.
That fight took longer to finish than many local residents expected. Witham-Jordan was arrested in October 2023 and charged with murder. His first trial ended in a mistrial, leaving the case unresolved and forcing prosecutors to try again. The retrial in Sagadahoc County Superior Court lasted nine days. Jurors received the case on March 2, 2026, and returned a guilty verdict the next morning. Their decision aligned with the prosecution’s account and rejected the defense effort to shift responsibility. After the verdict, Makinzlee’s mother said the jury “got the right one,” a brief remark that captured the emotional weight surrounding a case that had stretched across more than three years.
By then, the story carried more than courtroom facts. Court documents had already shown that DHHS investigated the home in October 2022 after a daycare report of bruises, a scratch and swelling under one eye. Officials publicly said confidentiality laws prevented fuller comment. That earlier contact did not decide the jury’s verdict, but it changed the meaning of the case in the community. The story was no longer only about what happened in the apartment that night. It was also about whether the danger around Makinzlee had been visible before Christmas and whether the systems around her had understood it in time.
With the conviction now in place, the next public step is sentencing. As of March 31, 2026, reviewed reporting had not provided a detailed sentencing schedule. The case has moved from reconstruction of a Christmas morning death to the final court decision on punishment.
Author note: Last updated March 31, 2026.