By RUSS OLIVO

PROVIDENCE — Testifying in his own defense Monday, accused child killer Gilbert Delestre repeatedly denied hurling his 3-year-old foster son across the living room of his Woonsocket apartment, and gave jurors an alternative explanation for why a babysitter claimed to have seen him doing so.

Delestre told jurors in Superior Court that his arm was stretched out not because he had thrown the boy, Thomas T.J. Wright, but because he was pointing to a set of keys on the fireplace.
“Are you positive you never threw T.J.?” asked defense lawyer Robert Mann.
“Yes,” Delestre replied.
The case could go to the jury as early as today, after closing arguments from lawyers and instructions in the law from Associate Superior Court Justice Netti C. Vogel.
Delestre, 27, is charged with first-degree murder and conspiracy in the fatal beating of the boy.  His girlfriend and T.J.’s aunt, Katherine Bunnell, 25, was convicted of second-degree murder and conspiracy in May and has been sentenced to life with the possibility of parole for her role in the crime.
Prosecutors say that on Oct. 30, 2004, Delestre and Bunnell took turns beating the boy after coming home from a night of drinking and finding a mess of yogurt and milk on a new carpet in their living room at 2229 Diamond Hill Road. At the time, the couple was caring not only for two small girls of their own, but T.J. and his two older siblings because their mother — Bunnell’s sister — was in prison in Illinois on drug charges.
Wearing a dark, double-breasted suit and tie with a white shirt, Delestre, sporting a fresh buzz cut, testified for more than three hours Monday, including a grueling cross-examination in which he admitted having previously told numerous lies about what happened on the night of the fatal beating.
Although he occasionally bit his lip nervously and scratched his forehead, Delestre was, for the most part, composed and dispassionate in his retelling of events that unfolded in his apartment the night T.J. was brutally beaten.
As Mann had promised jurors in his opening statement, Delestre told jurors that the only time he ever struck T.J. was on a flight of stairs, and that he didn’t mean to hurt the boy.
Mann claims his client is guilty of the lesser offense of manslaughter for what he did, but Delestre appeared to contradict the prior testimony of Roderick and a medical expert who said the boy died of wounds that were too numerous and severe to have been caused merely by falling down stairs.
The boy died of multiple blunt force trauma, including bleeding and swelling on the brain and a broken thigh which caused massive internal hemorrhaging.
Under questioning by Mann, Delestre said he placed the boy on the staircase after Bunnell took the babysitter home, then chastised him for making a mess on the floor and struck him on the forehead, causing him to fall backwards down eight to 10 steps.
“I told him he was a bad boy,” Delestre said. “I ended up backhanding him down the stairs.”
Delestre said he tried to catch the boy but it was too late. The boy did “a flip” onto his head and after that, he seemed unconscious.
“Oh (expletive),” Delestre recalled saying. “I got scared. I think he was unconscious. I tried to speak to him. He can’t really speak that well. I think I heard him trying to say ‘yes’ or something. I ended up putting him to bed.”
Roderick testified previously that she was awakened by Bunnell and Delestre entering the home screaming and swearing about the mess on the carpet. After that, she saw Delestre go upstairs and heard several loud slaps. Bunnell then dragged the boy down the stairs, pulled him over to the mess on the floor and slapped him in the chest and face, causing him to repeatedly strike head on the floor.
Bunnell’s parting shot was to admonish him for wasting food and pour a container of milk on his head. As Bunnell searched for her keys to take her home, Roderick said she saw Delestre appearing to throw the boy and heard him order Bunnell to take him away or he would “drop him.”
But Delestre denied he threatened to “drop” the boy. Delestre said his words were, “Get him out of here before I drop you.” He said he was actually talking to Bunnell and his statement was intended to get her to ease up on T.J.
Delestre also said the rapping noise he made upstairs came not from slaps, but from him trying to empty a bowl of human feces he had found as part of the mess in the living room. He said he “smacked” the bowl against he toilet several times times because the feces were stuck. Then he vomited.
Delestre testified he stayed upstairs for a while and heard Bunnell in the boys’ bedroom give T.J. “a  light” slap — the only time he had reason to believe she had used physical force on him except to see her pour milk on the boy.
Under cross examination by State Prosecutor Scott Erickson, however, Delestre withstood a fusillade of questions attacking his credibility. On numerous occasions, Delestre admitted, he had lied about the case, often when it suited his needs at the moment.
Delestre admitted that he lied, shifting blame on the babysitter, to the first person who asked what happened to T.J. — his cousin, Jose Santiago, who entered the apartment to discover the boy’s lifeless body draped in Bunnell’s arms. He said he lied to the first police officers who arrived to question him. He lied to a child welfare investigator because he didn’t want to lose custody of his children. And he lied in a letter to the boy’s biological mother, Karen Wright, because he wanted access to some family photos of his small girls, Daziya and Destiny.
“Is it fair to say, when you want something you feel free to lie about it in order to get what you want, isn’t that right?”
“Yes,” Delestre answered.
Delestre admitted that some of the lies he told were contained in a pair of letters, totaling 11 pages in all, that he wrote to a fellow inmate at the ACI. Delestre said he included the false information, including a detailed story of being coached and physically beaten by Woonsocket police officers attempting to elicit a confession from him, because he did not want to be known among prisoners as “a babykiller.”
Erickson pointed out a number of instances in which his testimony was not even consistent with a videotaped confession he gave to Detective Sgt. Todd R. Brien, in which he admitted knocking the boy down the stairs. Among other things, Delestre tried to excuse his behavior in the statement by claiming he was drunk, and he said Bunnell actually struck the boy several times.
Even though he had had some beers at a friend’s house and then drank some more on the way to, and while hewas at, the bar in Milford, Delestre said he was not drunk when he struck the boy. He was merely “tipsy.”
And he said he lied about how many times Bunnell had struck the boy because he was trying to “be a man” and cover up for her.
“Your idea of covering up for Katherine was to tell Detective Brien falsely that Katherine was striking the child.”
Delestre’s answer sounded more like a question. “Yes?” he said, shrugging his shoulders as if he were confused. Erickson asked the question a second time and Delestre seemed more sure of himself. “Yes.” he said.
“Was it true or was it not true?”
“No. I lied to him.”