So Many Injuries, Like a 'Symphony'/h1>
Doctor needs nearly a day to explain damage to boy
By Christie Blatchford
Originally published in the National Post, March 2, 2002
TORONTO — They had titles, like chapters in a grisly book.
They required their own Power Point presentation, with the expert in the witness stand equipped with a little lighted pointer that showed up as a tiny white arrow that moved on the photographs displayed on the television screens strategically placed about the courtroom.
Just describing them took the better part of a full day for Dr. Charles Smith, and even then he wasn't finished.
They are the external injuries that Dr. Smith discovered upon the body of little Randal Dooley on Sept. 26, 1998, for convenience grouped by location.
Dr. Smith is a veteran pediatric pathologist from the Hospital for Sick Children and the man who performed the autopsy on Randal, seven years old, three-feet-10-inches tall, and just a little shy of cracking the 42-pound barrier when he was found dead in his brother's bed the morning before he was placed on Dr. Smith's perforated stainless steel table.
Randal's natural father, Tony, and his stepmother, Marcia, are accused of second-degree murder in Randal's death, and as has become their custom at their trial here, they sat unmoved through yesterday's evidence, Mrs. Dooley rarely lifting her head from her relentless note-making and Mr. Dooley appearing to direct his gaze past the monitor on his lawyers' table upon the witness. Their collective poise—with pictures of that child of theirs clicking steadily through on screens everywhere in the room—was remarkable.
First on the various monitors came the series of photographs called Scarring on the Right Side of Face, followed by Scarring Centre of Forehead. Abrasions Left Side of Forehead was next, and after that, Scarring on Right Side of Face. Then, for good measure, just plain Face. In swift succession, though not swiftly enough, came Scarring on Left Cheek; Missing Tooth; Injuries to Bottom Lips; Injuries to Area of Left Neck; Marks on Right Side of Neck; Injuries to Left Side of Head and Face; Abdominal and Chest Injuries; Upper Right Chest; Left Chest; Right Pelvis, and Lower Abdomen.
Bringing up the rear was Injuries to Left Side, which is when Mr. Justice Eugene Ewaschuk called it a day.
What prosecutor Rita Zaied told these jurors weeks ago—that Randal was injured from stem to stern—was not lawyerly licence, rather the simple truth of it.
But for the palms of his hands and the soles of his feet, Dr. Smith said yesterday, and the boy's "relatively unscarred" scalp, there wasn't an inch of the "rich lustre" of Randal's skin, as he rather lyrically put it, that wasn't damaged.
In his low soothing voice, Dr. Smith appeared to be running out of words to describe the smorgasbord of injuries before him.
Some were abrasions, others bruises, some scratch-like marks that could have come from fingernails, others merely marks. Some were recent, or in medical language, acute; others appeared a little older, or sub-acute; many were chronic, or perhaps several months old. Some would have bled; some not. There were areas of hyperpigmentation (where Randal's lovely dark skin was darker than normal) and areas of hypopigmentation (areas where the skin was unusually pale, suggestive of cell death, or actual tears). There were red places, and yellow ones.
There were parts that were clearly swollen (such as Randal's right eye), and parts that only might have been (such as his left).
There were "train track" parallel lines on Randal's face that looked, to Dr. Smith, as though he could have been whipped with a worn bungee cord that is already a trial exhibit. There was a readily identifiable pattern of distinctive U-shaped marks that he thought were consistent with the J-shaped ends of the bungee cord, others he believed could have been made by various of the metal-adorned belts that were seized at the Dooley townhouse or by a human fist or by a broomstick, and one big old odd-shaped complex scar (above Randal's right nipple) that he thought might have been inflicted by a hanger.
There were some injuries that might be explained by a boy's typical headlong rush through life.
As Dr. Smith said, the medical man and the poet mixing nicely, "Randal will be crashing through his world on his bony protuberances," by which he meant he would expect to have seen scraped knees and scabby elbows.
There were others for which he couldn't offer explanations: They were too old, too faint, too vague. One might have been a burn mark, but he wasn't at all sure of that; he just wanted it left as a possibility.But the injuries to the groin, to the left side of the abdomen (with its dozen marks in those few precious inches in a vast jumble of curious shapes), to the underarm, the inside of the thighs, these are even in a rambunctious boy naturally protected parts of the human body, Dr. Smith said, and the damage thus "very suspicious" or "highly suspicious" or "extremely disturbing."
Taken individually, he said, that one there might look like an insect bite, that one like a whip mark, that like a bruise. Each separate mark is akin to a single note of a piece of music. If you hear only a few, you might be unable to recognize the work.
"But if you listen to all the notes, you identify the symphony," he said. "Considered in totality, many of them are inflicted injuries."
At the autopsy, he said, he gave up counting, as yesterday, he said, he couldn't possibly describe each injury or "we will be here a very long time." He was apologetic about this, saying several times, "I can't count them all" or "I couldn't count all of the marks. Some are discrete; some flow together," or, of the Injuries to Area of Left Neck, "There are five different marks from at least two occasions," or, "No, I can't, there's many, many marks, I don't know if it's one mark or more than one mark."
Dr. Smith has in his time performed about 2,000 autopsies on dead children.
Ms. Zaied asked if he had ever seen a child more terribly damaged. "I think this is as bad as it gets," he said.
When Randal Dooley came to the doctor's perforated table, he was clad in a pair of pull-up diapers, white socks, and pajamas decorated with cartoon characters wearing Toronto Maple Leaf uniforms. "Tasmanian Devils," Dr. Smith guessed, and peered more closely at his screen. "Yup," he said, "I think that's the Tas."
The Tas and the Leafs, followed by Scarring on Right Side of Face. Randal's world as it ought to have been, and as it was.
