Randal Could Not Have Died as Stepmother Said: Doctor
Seizure caused 7-year-old to fall off ladder, trial hears
By Christie Blatchford
Originally published in the National Post, February 27, 2002
TORONTO - Hypothetically, a hypothetical question is just that—a supposition used as a starting point for further discussion or argument.
But in the criminal courts, it is also a useful lawyer's tool for examining an expert witness, and yesterday, Rita Zaied put a whopper of a one to Dr. Robin Humphreys.
Ms. Zaied is prosecuting Tony and Marcia Dooley, respectively the father and stepmother of Randal Dooley, for second-degree murder in the little boy's dreadful death.
Randal, just turned seven, was discovered battered and lifeless in his big brother's bed on the morning of Sept. 25, 1998. An autopsy later revealed he had suffered 14 broken ribs, a lacerated liver and four distinct brain injuries.
Dr. Humphreys, a pediatric neurosurgeon for whom Randal's case was the 13,542nd of his storied career, is testifying here for the prosecution as an expert in the causes of trauma in children.
Ms. Zaied's "hypothetical" to him yesterday was 13 pages long.
Critically, what she got from Dr. Humphreys was his learned opinion that the final, and fatal, brain injury to Randal could not have occurred as Mrs. Dooley told the Toronto Police it had.
Shortly after firemen found her stepson stiff with rigor mortis—Mr. Dooley had phoned 911 to complain that "it seems like my little son has killed himself or something"—Mrs. Dooley told officers that Randal had been climbing the four-foot-high ladder on the bunk bed he shared with his brother Teego when he abruptly fell to the floor, making an odd sound she described as a "whoa-whoa" noise and clenching his teeth and shaking.
But Dr. Humphreys disputed that explanation yesterday.
At Ms. Zaied's request, the neurosurgeon-in-chief at the Hospital for Sick Children walked over and inspected the actual bright blue-framed bunkbed, which has sat in a corner of the courtroom for weeks now and is a formal exhibit.
"In my opinion, in a child of this age, over 40 pounds, falling from the second or third step on that ladder, would not lead to this injury," he told the jurors.
Far more likely, he said, was that Randal suffered his last serious brain injury about 12 to 18 hours before his death—certainly no longer than 24 hours earlier—and that he was having a seizure while on the ladder.
In other words, it wasn't the fall that caused the seizure, as his stepmother's statement to police seems to suggest, but rather the seizure—itself the result of the recent brain injury—that caused the little boy to tumble from the ladder.
Dr. Humphreys has reviewed the post-mortem findings and said that Randal suffered the distinctive constellation of violent injuries commonly found in children only when they have either been in serious car crashes and been ejected from the vehicle, fallen two or three storeys—or been roughly shaken, hurled against a fixed object or shaken and thrown such that the head hits a sharp object.
Only those scenarios "set the stage for bleeding inside of the skull and bleeding behind the eyes" that distinguished Randal's grave head injury, Dr. Humphreys said.
Using a little laser pointer and seven autopsy pictures that show the little boy's exposed brain, he explained the damage to the jurors, pointing out the stuff "that looks like black current jelly" was a huge blood clot that actually shifted Randal's brain across the midline as it swelled inside his skull, and the telltale smaller clots, one in each eye.
As "a single-vehicle accident can create havoc" on a big highway, Dr. Humphreys said, so can an insult to the brain.
The jurors have heard that shortly after arriving in Canada from his native Jamaica to rejoin his father and his wife, Randal began to regress and deteriorate.
In about 10 months, this normal, healthy boy who was the hit of his Grade 1 class had become a thin and jumpy shadow who vomited up his food and was so often incontinent he had to wear pull-up diapers at night.
Both Mr. and Mrs. Dooley told police Randal seemed normal the night before he was discovered dead—though, by their own descriptions, he had been vomiting and soiling himself frequently. "You would be suspicious hearing that called normal, Doctor?" Ms. Zaied asked.
"Quite," said Dr. Humphreys.
