Defense: Girl's death 'tragic accident'

Peoria Journal Star, The (IL)

Author: GARY L. SMITH

HENNEPIN - Murder defendant Matthew Archer landed on his tiny 3-year-old foster child with so much force that his knee went "almost all the way through her," jurors were told Tuesday as the 28-year-old Granville man's trial got under way in Putnam County Circuit Court.

And that statement was made by Archer's defense attorney, Kevin Sullivan, who emphasized there is no dispute about the physical cause of Jordan Cain's death late on Oct. 24, 2003, in the home where the girl and her two brothers had been placed just two months earlier.

Yet Sullivan and State's Attorney James Mack sketched starkly different scenarios of how and why that incident took place in their opening statements to the eight men and four women who will decide Archer's fate on charges of first-degree murder and aggravated battery of a child.

"Tragic accident," said Sullivan. Murder, said Mack, who maintained medical evidence will prove the girl's injuries "non-accidental."

According to Mack, Archer told police at least 20 different versions of what happened that night before a police officer and ambulance crew arrived in response to a 911 call from his then girlfriend and now wife, Janice Schryer Archer.

While Archer initially said that he heard Jordan shout and then found her pale and limp in her bed, he later told officers that "he did like a knee-drop on her" as she lay on the floor, Mack said.

And in one version of that account, Archer "acknowledged the knee-drop was kind of super-duper hard," like the actions portrayed in professional wrestling, Mack added.

Barely responsive when emergency crews arrived, Jordan was taken to St. Margaret's Hospital in Spring Valley and then transferred to OSF Saint Francis Medical Center in Peoria. She died on the operating table at 7:35 the next morning.

An autopsy found blunt force trauma to her abdomen had torn loose the mesentery, a heavy membrane attaching internal organs to the abdominal wall, and ruptured a major artery, Mack said.

"Non-accidental blunt force trauma," Mack told jurors, "due to the force needed to cause those injuries."

Archer did cause those injuries, but by falling on the girl accidentally, Sullivan countered. His account described a firm but concerned foster father who had been rocking Jordan in an effort to get her to fall asleep before being placed in her own bed.

When Archer stood at one point and intended to lay the girl on an ottoman, he failed to get her squarely set there, and she fell about 18 inches to the floor, Sullivan told jurors. As he bent to pick her up, Sullivan added "his knees buckled," and he landed on her body.

"He felt his knee go almost all the way through her," Sullivan said. However, he added, "He did not intend to do it, he did not do it knowingly, it was a tragic accident."

Sullivan explained Archer's conflicting accounts to police as the reaction of a man who was short on sleep and distraught during lengthy questioning.

The trial resumes at 9 a.m. today and is expected to last all week. Prosecutors are not seeking the death penalty, but Archer would face 20 to 60 years if convicted of murder.