DOCTOR TELLS OF BID TO SAVE BOY WHO INGESTED DETERGENT

Author: MATT GRYTA - News Staff Reporter

Jessica Vitale-Elgie's 5-year-old adopted son was clinically dead before he was revived at a suburban hospital hours after swallowing some laundry detergent, according to the pediatric critical-care physician who tried to save his life.

Dr. Bradley P. Fuhrman testified Tuesday in State Supreme Court that Casey "C.J." Elgie had been deteriorating internally for hours before doctors first saw him at Millard Fillmore Suburban Hospital in Amherst on Aug. 31, 2000.

Fuhrman, who pronounced Casey dead at 10:50 that night after two hours of efforts to save him in Children's Hospital, told Justice Joseph S. Forma that "something was going wrong all day long" medically with the boy after he swallowed the liquid detergent.

The nonjury trial of Vitale-Elgie, 39, on a charge of criminally negligent homicide was scheduled to resume today.

Vitale-Elgie, 39, is on paid leave from her job as a special-education teacher for the Buffalo Public Schools. She has been living apart from her husband, Michael, and has only supervised visits with her three surviving children: a 9-year-old adopted daughter and 4-year-old twin sons.

Fuhrman testified that Casey's "heart had already stopped beating" by the time Vitale-Elgie and her husband rushed him to Millard Fillmore Suburban about 7 p.m.

Doctors at Millard Fillmore Suburban resuscitated Casey, who had not been breathing and had not had any blood pressure. About two hours later, the boy was brought to Children's Hospital.

By the time Casey, who was only half the size of a normal 5-year-old boy, arrived at Children's, he was dying of excessive sodium in his system and aspiration pneumonia caused by the detergent that had filled his lungs, Fuhrman testified.

Under questioning from a prosecutors and defense attorneys, Fuhrman told the judge that while he has treated a number of children for aspiration pneumonia, Casey was the first he had seen with liquid detergent as the cause.

Monday, the first day of the trial, Amherst Police Detective Edward Moran testified that Vitale-Elgie acknowledged having given Casey water to make him vomit some of the detergent as soon as she noticed him with a spongeful of it in his mouth but that she did not immediately contact medical help.

Indicted 18 months after the death, Vitale-Elgie pleaded guilty Dec. 2, 2002, but withdrew her plea last March. If convicted, she could face one to four years in prison.

e-mail: mgryta@buffnews.com