Shaken toddler or brain disease? A jury must now decide if a 22-month-old boy died at the hands of his mother, or from some othe
A jury must now decide if a 22-month-old boy died at the hands of his mother, or from some other cause.
Author: GREGORY D. KESICH Staff Writer
Dateline: AUBURN
An Androscoggin County jury will have to decide if a Lisbon Falls toddler died of an undiagnosed brain disease, or if he was shaken to death by his mother. Sarah Allen has been charged with manslaughter for the death of her son Nathaniel, who died on Feb. 14, 2003, after emergency brain surgery at Maine Medical Center.
Prosecutors, supported by the testimony of nine doctors, say that the cause of death was child abuse. But the last witness presented by the defense on Monday, at the close of the 10-day trial in Androscoggin County Superior Court, said that it was probably something else.
Dr. Suzanne de la Monte, a neuropathologist and brain researcher on the faculty of Brown University, testified that she believed that an undetected neurological disease and seizure disorder caused Nathaniel to stop breathing and was the likely cause of his death.
"There was no concrete evidence of trauma," said de la Monte, who observed the child's brain autopsy. "There was no finding that would allow one to say that this was a result of trauma."
Allen stands accused of killing her adopted son when the boy was 22 months old. If convicted, she will face as much as 40 years in prison.
Nathaniel was taken to Mid Coast Hospital in Brunswick after his mother reported that he was limp and unconscious after a series of falls in a bathtub and on a carpeted floor of their home in Lisbon Falls.
The doctors who treated or examined Nathaniel say those simple falls could not have caused the "constellation of injuries" observed in the child the night he died. He had bleeding inside his skull and neck, hemorrhages in his eyes and swelling in his brain, all compatible with a whiplash-type injury
But de la Monte said telltale brain damage that would have been expected in that type of injury was absent in Nathaniel's case. She said the white matter around neurons in the brain had none of the tearing usually found in shaken babies. She said there were other explanations besides trauma for the bleeding in his brain, eyes and neck.
Nathaniel's falling could not have caused his death, de la Monte said, but it might have been a symptom of the thing that did.
"A small fall in the tub does not cause death," she testified. "A small fall in the tub can indicate that something is going wrong in the brain."
Deputy Medical Examiner Michel Ferenc also testified Monday, to rebut de la Monte. He said that the child had died of "inflicted head trauma."
"The head and neck were jerked or whiplashed or shaken so they went back and forth," he said. "It caused the brain to swell, the blood flow got cut off and the brain died."
Verne Paradie, Allen's lawyer, told jurors that the doctors and police rushed to judgment when they saw a child with a serious brain injury who had not been in a car accident or fallen from a great height.
The doctors didn't believe Allen's story about a series of small falls, Paradie said, so they stopped looking for ways in which the boy could have been injured.
No testing for a neurological disease or seizure disorder was done, Paradie said, even though the boy had shown some delays in walking and talking that could have been a sign of trouble. No effort was made to research his birth parents in Guatemala for hereditary illness or alcohol and drug use that could have caused his death.
"They just ask, `Can a fall cause these injuries? No. Then it's abuse,' " he said. "Sarah Allen is arrested and brought to jail. She has never been able to mourn her son and she has spent tens of thousands of dollars to prove her innocence."
Assistant Attorney General Lisa Marchese said the case was simple.
"The state is not saying that Sarah Allen did not love her son. My job is not to prove that Sarah Allen is a bad person," Marchese said.
"The state is saying that Sarah Allen became so frustrated with his behavior that she shook him with such force that she caused traumatic brain injury, and that is what caused his death," she said.
The jury will continue its deliberations today.
Staff Writer Gregory D. Kesich can be contacted at 791-6336 or at:
gkesich@pressherald.com