Witness: Dorsey told never to shake children

WOODLAND — Darnell Dorsey sought advice about child discipline less than a month before his arrest for allegedly inflicting fatal injuries on his girlfriend’s toddler son, a relative of the child testified this week.

“He was asking me questions,” said Ellen Contini, the step-grandmother of 20-month-old Cameron Morrison and a prosecution witness at Dorsey’s ongoing trial in Yolo Superior Court.

At age 21, Dorsey found himself in a caregiving role for his 3-year-old son as well as Cameron, who was not his biological child, after recently moving into their mother Veronica Rix’s home on Olive Drive in Davis.

Having raised several boys of her own, Contini said she urged Dorsey to impose time-outs over physical discipline when the boys misbehaved, or to bring them to her nearby home if he ever felt overwhelmed.

Contini also told Dorsey to “never, ever shake them, because you can make their little brains rattle around inside their skulls, and it can kill them,” she testified Wednesday.

Dorsey, now 24, is accused of fatally shaking Cameron while caring for him and his brother, causing traumatic brain and internal injuries that resulted in the boy’s death on Jan. 25, 2014.

Whether he committed the alleged crime, however, is for a jury to decide. Dorsey’s defense attorneys claim Cameron suffered from a bad case of pneumonia that led to respiratory distress, the resulting lack of oxygen causing severe brain swelling that doctors mistook for a symptom of abuse.

Cameron never seemed timid or fearful around Dorsey, Contini acknowledged under questioning by Dorsey’s attorneys. Nor did she ever witness him lose his temper around the children or suspect him of abusing them.

In hindsight, however, Contini questioned whether Cameron had already suffered some abuse-related injuries about two weeks before he died.

Cameron appeared to have a black eye when the family gathered for his older brother’s birthday party at a bounce-house facility, Contini recalled. He became fussy and cried when jostled inside a bounce house, and when his aunt wrapped her arms around his torso to go down a slide.

Doctors later noticed that Cameron had multiple rib injuries, some new, others in various stages of healing.

“I believe that would have explained all of his behavior that day,” Contini said.

The defense contends that Cameron, his bones weakened by a vitamin D deficiency, likely suffered some of his broken ribs while receiving CPR on the way to the hospital.

The older ones, they say, resulted from a November 2013 fall down some stairs outside the family’s mobile home, which occurred when Dorsey was nearby talking to his girlfriend’s father.

But according to Contini, a relative picked up Cameron around his torso and lifted him into the air at a subsequent Thanksgiving gathering, and he showed no signs of being in pain or discomfort.

“Cameron laughed his head off,” she said.

Transferred from Sutter Davis Hospital to the UC Davis Medical Center’s pediatric trauma unit on the morning of Jan. 23, 2014, Cameron was found to have numerous injuries that doctors attributed to child abuse: brain swelling, retinal hemorrhaging, a lacerated liver and broken ribs.

“I saw multiple rib fractures on both sides, 18 in all,” Dr. Thomas Sanchez, a pediatric radiologist at the Med Center, testified Friday. Of those, nine were acute, or less than a week old, while another nine appeared to have occurred weeks earlier.

Eight of the breaks were posterior — close to the spine — while 10 were lateral, on the sides of the rib cage, according to Sanchez.

Sanchez, who evaluated a chest scan of Cameron but not the toddler himself, said the injuries were consistent with a tight squeezing of the rib cage. He opined that “the number of fractures, and the varying ages of the fractures, is consistent with non-accidental trauma.”

The doctor also declared rib fractures from CPR efforts to be rare, saying he had seen just one case involving a 3-month-old baby. He also noted a study on healing bone fractures conducted among 80 infants did not involve a single instance in which lifesaving efforts broke a child’s ribs.

But all of them would have been younger than Cameron, Sanchez acknowledged under cross-examination by defense attorney Joseph Gocke, who noted that the study specifically excluded children who had rickets or other bone-density deficiencies.

“I did not see any sign that the patient had rickets,” Sanchez said of Cameron, noting that the “vast majority” of rickets-related breaks occur at the bone joints.

Sanchez also expressed doubts as to whether the toddler suffered from pneumonia, though he conceded that an autopsy procedure would be more likely to reveal that condition, as opposed to the X-ray scans he reviewed.

Dorsey’s trial resumes Monday in Judge Paul Richardson’s courtroom.