Testimony details agony of child's suffering
Crocker Stephenson
Late Nov. 10, as 13-month-old Christopher Thomas lay in intensive care struggling to remain alive, two detectives at Milwaukee police headquarters sat at a metal table with the woman who would be charged in the child's fatal beating.
They were nearing the end of a three-hour interview. The detectives wanted her to explain: Why?
"Do you feel sorry for what happened?" Detective Jeremiah Jacks asked Crystal Keith, Christopher's aunt and kinship foster mother.
"It still feel like a dream," Keith replied.
For most of the interview, Keith spoke without inflection as she described, in excruciating detail, the abuse she had inflicted on Christopher and his 2-year-old sister. Now her voice is pleated with emotion.
"I need to wake up!" she cries. "I wish I could wake up!"
Keith, who turns 25 on Thursday, is accused of killing Christopher and torturing his 2-year-old sister. A recording of her statements to Jacks and Detective James Hutchinson was played Wednesday at her trial.
Charged with first-degree reckless homicide and with physical abuse of a child (intentional causation of great bodily harm), Keith faces up to 75 years in prison if she is convicted.
Christopher and his sister were removed from their mother's home in March 2008 and placed with Keith and her husband by the Bureau of Milwaukee Child Welfare in June. The bureau was responsible for sending caseworkers to the Keiths' home at least once a month. While a state Department of Children and Families report says caseworkers noticed no physical abuse, Crystal Keith told the detectives she began to abuse Christopher's sister within weeks of her arrival.
Jacks: "Is there anything that you would like to tell your husband and tell your brother-in-law, your sister-in-law?"
Keith: "That I'm sorry, that, that I told y'all everything because I know it was wrong and I'm ready for the punishment."
Jacks: "Did you know what you were doing was wrong?"
Keith: "I knew it was wrong, but I never knew I could take it this far. I never did. I knew that in my heart I was going too far and so because I tried to stop, but it was just getting on my nerves so bad I could never stop."
The recording is the closest Keith's jury will get to hearing her side of the story; Keith told Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Patricia McMahon on Wednesday that she would not testify.
Keith's attorney, Richard Hart, rested the defense after calling one witness, Michael Kula, a psychologist who testified that Keith suffers from depression, post traumatic stress disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder, anxiety disorder and schizoid personality disorder.
Most of Wednesday's testimony focused on the injuries suffered by Christopher's sister, who survived what Lynn Sheets, a nationally recognized expert on child abuse and medical director of Child Advocacy and Protection Services at Children's Hospital of Wisconsin, called one of the worst cases of abuse she had ever seen.
Photographs of the girl's wounds were shown to the jury while Sheets provided a kind of narrative of the child's torment.
Twenty-one photographs of the child's burned, beaten and broken body were projected onto a large screen. A few jurors turned their heads, unable to look. A few observers sitting in the courtroom gallery wiped tears from their eyes. Some left the room.
The child's left leg had been broken in three places. A bone in the left arm was broken clean through just beneath the shoulder. She had ligature scars on her arm, neck, torso and leg. She had suffered burns from her head to her toes, some so deep that they had to be covered with skin that doctors shaved from her thighs.
A drawing of a human body was projected on the screen. It was covered with notes and arrows. Sheets said she had attempted to document all the girl's injuries but ran out of room.
Assistant District Attorney Mark Williams asked Sheets what kind of pain the girl would have felt.
"I don't know how you measure pain," Sheets replied. "She would have been in agony."