Mother of brain-injured infant testifies at accused father's trial

Apr. 30—Lauren Bonnett was at work the night of Sept. 2, 2020, when she received a text message from Hunter Kelley, the father of their 2-month-old daughter, Amelia: "I messed up."

A second message from Kelley, who was at their home in Carthage taking care of Amelia at the time, raised her anxiety all the more, she testified Tuesday on the second day of the 25-year-old father's jury trial in Jasper County Circuit Court on two counts of child abuse and a single count of child endangerment.

"Everyone's alive," the second text to her read, Bonnett told the court.

He called when she expressed her anxiety about what those messages meant, and he told her he had been forced to perform cardiopulmonary resuscitation on Amelia. She could hear their baby breathing in the background during the call and wondered what had happened that prompted him to perform CPR.

She got home a short time later, and Amelia appeared to be all right. Though Kelley's story kept changing some, she eventually decided it was just an instance of a young father being "overprotective," she told the court.

Over the next couple of days, the mother said, Amelia seemed to lose her appetite and became decidedly more fussy. On Sept. 5, the parents ended up taking her to an emergency room, where a nurse noted a bruise on her forehead. But the ER staff could find nothing else wrong with Amelia, Bonnett said.

Similarly, a scheduled visit to the office of the baby's pediatrician two or three days later raised no significant concerns, although Amelia's disposition failed to improve, she said.

The night of Sept. 11, Bonnett came home form work at a Pizza Hut and went to bed while Kelley stayed up tending Amelia and playing a computer game. Bonnett was awakened about 2 a.m. by the crying of her daughter and got up and changed her diaper and asked Kelley to give her a bottle.

She testified that shortly after returning to bed: "I heard a scream, a scream straight out of a horror movie."

She rushed out to investigate and found Kelley holding their baby. She said he told her Amelia had erupted when he took her bottle from her mouth. Bonnett said she sat down on their couch with their dog, and he suddenly told her he thought Amelia wasn't breathing.

He got down on the floor and was performing CPR as she called 911 for help, and police and paramedics arrived and took over rescue efforts.

Assistant Prosecutor Scott Watson asked Bonnett why she failed to mention anything about Amelia having stopped breathing Sept. 2 when they took her to the ER three days later or to the pediatrician's office.

"I quite honestly didn't think anything had happened," she said, adding that she regrets "to this day" not having informed doctors of it at the time.

Diagnosis

Amelia was taken first to Mercy Hospital Carthage and transferred from there to the critical care unit at Mercy Springfield, where doctors diagnosed the child's distress as nonaccidental head trauma.

Dr. Diane Lipscomb, a pediatrics critical care physician at Mercy Springfield, testified Tuesday that Amelia was unresponsive upon arrival, with episodes of increasing cranial pressure, heart rate and blood pressure, and had to be put on a ventilator. She said that scans and tests showed Amelia had a single rib fracture in a stage of healing and was hypoxic, with subdural hematomas and retinal hemorrhaging, all signs of nonaccidental brain injury.

The girl spent four months at Children's Mercy Hospital in Kansas City after being treated the first couple of weeks at the Springfield hospital. Her mother said she has been readmitted to hospitals a dozen times since then and requires extensive home nursing care.

"I was told she's not predicted to live past the age of 5," Bonnett told the court.

Lt. Jeff Pinnell of the Carthage Police Department was one of two detectives who interviewed Bonnett and Kelley at the hospital in Springfield that day, and a recording of the interview of the father was played for jurors.

Kelley told them that he had fed Amelia a bottle after she woke up crying at 2 a.m. and that he was burping her when she became unresponsive. They asked about the scream that woke the mother and he told them: "She looked me dead in the eyes and just started screaming."

The detectives began leaning on him, telling him his account was not the least bit consistent with the nature of her injuries. Kelley explained that her head may have struck his arm as he was laying her down or that he may have set her down too hard.

Medical evidence

The detectives told him they knew there was more to it than that, that they knew what happened, that there was medical evidence of the truth. They told him he had best just admit what he had done. That admission might help people see him as just "a dad who lost his cool" and not "a monster," they suggested.

Kelley started becoming increasingly emotional at that point in the interview and after suggesting that he may have "blacked out," finally admitted that he shook his daughter.

"I lost my temper, and I shook her," he tearfully told them, acknowledging that he had done the same to her the night of Sept. 2.

"I didn't mean, I didn't mean to get pissed off and shake her like that. I didn't mean to," he said.

Defense attorney Jacqueline Jimenez cross-examined Pinnell at length about the detectives' questioning of Kelley, getting the detective to acknowledge that they already suspected the defendant of having abused the girl going into the interview to the exclusion of other possible explanations of her condition.

Pinnell acknowledged that he became increasingly accusatory of Kelley in a manner that he had not employed in speaking with Bonnett. He admitted that in pressuring Kelley, he falsely told him his daughter had bruising, although Pinnell explained that he honestly believed that at the time.

Defense attorney Kelsey Kent called Dr. David Ayoub, a diagnostic radiologist, to testify via WebEx conferencing that in his review of the girl's medical information and X-rays, the lone skeletal injury he could see was the single rib fracture, which he considered to be a relative rarity in inflicted injury cases. He said that injury was 7 to 11 weeks old and could have been sustained at birth.

The defense is expected to resume presenting its case at 9 a.m. Wednesday at the courts building in Joplin.