Gilbert Delestre on trial for fatal beating of 3-year-old

By RUSS OLIVO

PROVIDENCE — With a medical expert in pediatric child abuse as their guide, jurors in Superior Court were subjected to a graphic inventory of 3-year-old T.J. Wright’s fatal injuries Friday.

And they couldn’t have been caused by falling down a flight of stairs, said Dr. Reena Isaac, undermining a central pillar of defendant Gilbert Delestre’s defense on charges of murdering the child.
“That’s not what we see,” Isaac testified. “This child sustained multiple injuries. Many children fall down stairs and we don’t see this amount of injuries.”
Isaac was testifying on the third day of testimony in Delestre’s trial, a day which also included a dramatic account from a friend of the defendant who tried to save the Woonsocket boy’s life. Delestre is charged with first-degree murder and conspiracy in the death of his foster son.
Prosecutors say that on Oct. 30, 2004, Delestre, 27, and his girlfriend, Katherine Bunnell, 25 — the boy’s aunt and foster mother — beat the boy after he spilled some milk and yogurt on their new living room rug. Bunnell was convicted of second-degree murder in May for her role in the crime and is serving life in prison, with the possibility of parole.
There were four other children in the household on the night of the murder, including two of T.J.’s older brothers and two small girls Delestre and Bunnell had in common. The couple was caring for three of Bunnell’s nephews because their mother, Karen Wright — Bunnell’s sister — was in jail in Illinois on drug charges.
Isaacs, an assistant professor of pediatrics at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, was working as a consulting pediatrician at Hasbro Children’s Hospital on the night of the beating, when T.J. was brought into the emergency room.
The unconscious child arrived from Landmark Medical Center, where doctors had already tried to stabilize him, with red welts and bruises all over his body, face and head, particularly on the left hand side. His left leg and arm were in splints.
One of the first things Isaac did was check T.J.’s rating on the Glasgow Coma Scale, a medical barometer of a patient’s ability to respond to sensory stimuli. The scale ranges from 3 to 15.
“In T.J.’s case it was right in 3 to 4. That means there was no response,” said Isaac. “No eye movements, no motor movements or verbal response. It’s a very poor response. He was comatose.”

Under questioning by State Prosecutor Scott Erickson, Isaac described T.J.’s injuries as Erickson displayed a series of wrenchingly graphic series of photos of the child taken at Hasbro on a projection screen in Judge Netti C. Vogel’s darkened courtroom. It was an unsettling montage: a tiny, blond-haired child hooked up to a respirator, with tubes in his mouth and nose, his head cradled in a child-size cervical collar. Red and purplish bruises cover his face and forehead, particularly on the left side, and his closed eyes appear blackened and swollen.
One photo was a close up of T.J.’s bruised ear, with a reddish stain inside. The discoloration was an area where a combination of spinal fluid and blood had pooled inside the ear, which Isaac said was “a very rare finding” that was likely caused by a fracture at the base of the child’s skull.
T.J.s injuries, said Isaac, were caused by multiple blunt force trauma and included a large area of bleeding on his brain that was so severe it was exerting pressure on his brain and causing it to shift from one side of his skull to the other. The child also had a complete “transverse fracture” of his left femur, or thigh bone, a type of break in which one section of bone literally climbs atop the other. Such a wound takes “a significant amount of force” to inflict, she said.
In addition, both of the child’s eyes were bleeding internally from blunt force trauma, and one eye, the left, suffered what is known as a corneal abrasion. That is to say, part of the outer lens of the eye was “sloughed off,” said Isaac, adding, “it’s very painful.”
Isaac said doctors at Hasbro did their best to make T.J. comfortable and stabilize his medical condition, but he continued to slip away.
The following day, an MRI scan showed continued deterioration of T.J.’s brain cells, or “brain death,” said Isaac, an ominous sign.
“There’s no reversal of that portion of the brain and the rest of the body follows when brain death happens,” she said.
And so it was that on noon of Oct. 31, doctors officially declared T.J. dead. About an hour later, he was removed from the respirator that was keeping him breathing, and his heart stopped about a half-hour later.
Defense lawyer Robert Mann chose not to cross examine Isaac.

In other testimony Friday, Jose Santiago, 31, of Providence, testified that he had been out drinking with Delestre and Bunnell in the hours before the fatal beating, and ultimately stepped in to attempt to save the boy’s life. Actually, Santiago, a burly man who has a long criminal record, said he started drinking on the afternoon of Oct. 29 with other friends, hours before he hooked up with Delestre and Bunnell, kept drinking on the way to a Milford, Mass. bar with them, then drank more at the bar.
By the time they left Club 77 at about 1:40 a.m., Santiago said, “my world was spinning. I was drunk.”
Bunnell drove back to her apartment to get the babysitter while Delestre sat in the passenger seat and he stayed in the back, said Santiago. Bunnell went in first, but a few minutes later she came out yelling at Delestre, also known by his nickname, Junito. She was yelling, “Junito, get the (expletive) back in here and clean this mess that the baby made.”
Santiago thought it was funny that Delestre should take that kind of lip from his girlfriend, and he laughed. But after a few minutes Delestre followed Bunnell inside the house. Santiago intended to do the same, and he    started walking in, but he had to stop because he got sick from the alcohol and started vomiting. Inside, it sounded like an argument had erupted.
Santiago began walking to a friend’s apartment nearby, but then he remembered that he had forgotten his cell phone and jacket, so he returned to Delestre’s apartment. That’s when he saw Bunnell hoisting T.J.’s limp body in one arm, and clutching a cell phone in the other. Though drunk, the sight of the child woke him up, said Santiago, and he asked them what happened.
 “She just said the baby wasn’t breathing,” Santiago said. “I asked her if she called 911,” he said. “She said no, that she called her dad. I told her ‘Are you (expletive) crazy? This baby’s dying right here.’ So I snatched the baby from her. I grabbed the phone, I dialed 911.”
A recording of his frantic call was played for jurors.
As he waited for help, Santiago took the baby into the kitchen and put a spoon under his nose to see if he was breathing. He wasn’t. Santiago performed CPR on the boy who vomited all over him. Nevertheless, he kept doing it, or tried to, as the boy lay on the living room floor.
While he was breathing into the boy’s mouth, he said Bunnell tried to pull the boy away from him. He punched her in the mouth to get her away from him. Then he ordered Delestre to restrain her so he could continue, but it was hard because he was distracted by the two of them wrestling on the couch.

On Thursday, a babysitter testified that she witnessed Bunnell repeatedly slapping and punching the boy, causing him to fall and repeatedly strike his head on the floor. She said she was briefly distracted by the sight of Santiago “puking” outside before she saw Delestre hurl the boy across the floor, causing him to land with his leg awkwardly curled beneath his leg.
Defense lawyer Robert Mann has told jurors that Delestre did not throw the baby. Delestre will testify that he inadvertently knocked the boy down a flight of stairs, causing him serious injury Delestre should be charged with manslaughter, a lesser offense than the count of premeditated murder that he faces.
In other testimony Friday, retired Detective Anthony Wood and Detective Sgt. Roger Biron of the Woonsocket police testified about Delestre’s demeanor when they tried to take a statement from him. They described him as “arrogant” and “belligerent.”
“He was reclined in a chair, arms folded, head cocked, smiling, laughing,” said Biron. “He kept telling us over and over we should be looking at the babysitter. You guys are the (expletive) detectives. He kept telling us, ‘I ain’t tellin’ you (expletive), over and over again.”
Later, Delestre gave a videotaped statement to Detective Sgt. Todd Brien, whom he recognized from a youth basketball league. In the statement, Delestre tells Brien, among other things, about knocking the boy down a flight of stairs, after Bunnell had left him alone with T.J. to take the babysitter home – prosecutors say –  took turns viciously beating the child after they returned from a night of drinking to find the boy had spilled.