Jury deliberates child-death case

Author: Dennis Cassano; Staff Writer

The jury in the trial of a Robbinsdale woman accused of shaking her 2-year-old daughter to death deliberated about five hours Thursday but failed to reach a verdict.

The jury received the case about 4:30 p.m. at the end of a nine-day trial that pitted friends and relatives of Janet Ostlund, 33, against one another and that drove physicians to the point of name-calling.

Judge Robert Schumacher sent the jurors to a hotel about 9:30 p.m. They will try again to reach a verdict today.

Ostlund said her daughter was injured when she fell from a couch July 14. Because there were no witnesses, the case turned on two points: Was Ostlund the sort of person who would shake her child violently, and did the medical evidence show that Maria was shaken or that she fell off a couch?

Among the last witnesses to testify yesterday was Dr. Ronald Glasser, a pediatrician at Minneapolis Children's Hospital. He said that a pediatrician who testified for the prosecution, Dr. David Dassenko, told him earlier this month, "This is a very complicated case and I don't think that she did it."

Glasser is the husband of Dr. Janis Amatuzio, a pathologist and assistant coroner for Scott, Dakota and Chisago counties. Earlier, Amatuzio was severely critical of procedures used by the Hennepin County Medical Examiner's Office in investigating the case and concluding that Maria Ostlund died after being vigorously shaken.

Dassenko, who took care of the child in the hospital intensive care unit July 15, the day she died, testified earlier that he did not remember the conversation with Glasser.

Dr. Gerald Slater, a pediatric neurologist at Hennepin County Medical Center, returned to the witness stand yesterday to rebut prosecution witnesses who said they had never heard of his theory that the brain of a child with prior injuries would be more vulnerable to severe injuries.

Dr. John MacDonald, a pediatric neurologist at Children's Hospital, had testified that a chart Slater used to explain what he was saying was actually a chart MacDonald had prepared and that it had nothing to do with the point Slater was making.

Slater said yesterday that the chart was developed 200 years ago and "it's a bit of megalomania to say, `I designed this chart.' "

During the course of the trial, a number of Ostlund's friends and relatives testified that they had seen Ostlund treat her daughter roughly.

They said she had carried the child by one arm, that she had fed the child food that was too hot and made her cry, that the inside of Maria's mouth had been bloody one day and that an eye had been blackened a different time, that Ostlund had slapped Maria in the face and that she had been seen shaking Maria slightly.

Another group of friends and relatives testified that Ostlund and Maria had been very close, that Ostlund had taken good care of the child and had loved her deeply. Some were the parents of children for whom Ostlund cared at her day-care center.

Defense attorney Steve Meshbesher and Assistant County Attorney John Brink each took his turn minimizing the importance of one group and emphasizing that of the other.

Brink said the relatives had no reason to perjure themselves and said that made their testimony important. He argued that the day-care parents had limited contact with Ostlund and therefore did not see any of the things the relatives said they saw.

Meshbesher said the relatives who were critical testified they saw Ostlund once a month at most but that the day-care parents saw her twice every day, when they dropped off and picked up their children, and that some of them spent as much as 30 minutes with Ostlund twice a day.

He repeated the allegation that Ostlund fed her daughter hot corn and added with sarcasm, "Sounds like a murderer to me."

The doctors who testified for the prosecution were the specialists who treated Maria at Children's Hospital and the pathologists from the medical examiner's office.

They said there were no scalp injuries to indicate that she had fallen, so her brain must have been injured because she was shaken.

The doctors who testified for the defense were other coroners and other specialists who were asked to review the case records. They said the medical evidence shows Maria could not have been shaken to death and that she died after falling.

A small bleeding patch was found under her scalp at the back of her head. The defense doctors said that indicated she had fallen and the fall was severe enough to have caused her brain to swell until she died. The prosecution doctors said that injury was too small to have caused the brain damage.

The defense doctors said she was more vulnerable to massive brain damage from a small blow because her brain and head were abnormally small and she probably was retarded. The prosecution doctors dismissed that contention as not based in scientific fact.