WOODLAND — Defense attorneys for child assault suspect Darnell Dorsey launched into the crux of their case this week, calling the first of their medical experts who say it was illness — and not forceful shaking injuries — that caused the death of his girlfriend’s toddler son.
“There is no evidence of trauma in this case whatsoever,” Dr. Roland Auer, a Canada-based neuropathologist and admitted skeptic of shaken-baby syndrome, testified during his two full days on the witness stand at Dorsey’s ongoing trial.
Rather, it was”wide-ranging” pneumonia that triggered a fatal onslaught of maladies in 20-month-old Cameron Morrison, Auer told the Yolo County jury.
Cameron died on Jan. 25, 2014, three days after his mother Veronica Rix arrived at her Olive Drive home in Davis to discover her son was not breathing. Dorsey had been caring for Cameron, who is not his biological child, and his 3-year-old half-brother at the time.
Dorsey, 24, has pleaded not guilty to felony charges of assault on a child resulting in death.
His lawyers contend that medical staff at Sutter Davis Hospital and the UC Davis Medical Center who saw Cameron’s severe brain swelling and other injuries hastily concluded he had been abused, and failed to consider other possible explanations.
For that, the defense retained Auer, an expert in adult and pediatric brain damage with Royal University Hospital in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan in Canada, who diagnosed ischemia — inadequate blood flow in the body — as a chief factor in Cameron’s demise, stemming from a severe bout of pneumonia.
Although doctors who personally examined Cameron and reviewed his X-rays have testified they detected no signs of the infection, Auer insisted based on his review of tissue samples that his lungs were “full of it,” compromising his ability to breathe oxygen into the bloodstream.
Cameron also was anemic, he said, requiring an even higher blood flow to get the proper amount of oxygen to his brain.
Injuries explained
Weakened by the pneumonia, Cameron went into respiratory distress, and the resulting lack of oxygen to the heart — hypoxia — sent him into cardiac arrest, according to Auer. That in turn impacted the quantity and quality of blood directed to his brain.
Deprived of oxygen in that vital organ, Cameron experienced a boost in lactic acid levels — found in lab results to be about six to seven times the normal amount — that “will make the brain acid and damage it,” Auer testified. The swelling to his brain “is a result of leakage of fluid, and that’s called edema.”
Added swelling occurred when a breathing tube initially was placed too far down Cameron’s trachea at Sutter Davis Hospital, sending oxygen into just one lung and increasing blood flow to the brain, according to Auer, who also blamed the extreme cranial pressure for the retinal hemorrhaging that Med Center doctors interpreted as a telltale sign of abuse.
Further complicating matters were the efforts to revive Cameron with CPR, which Auer said sent a surge of blood into vessels already damaged by the lack of oxygen. Those vessels then leaked, a condition known as “reperfusion hemmorhaging.”
“It’s often misinterpreted as abuse,” Auer said. But he noted the bleeding was present in multiple areas of Cameron’s body, including the area around his spinal cord in addition to his brain.
“Trauma is focal. This is everywhere,” he said. “This is a sign of something that happened to the whole body.”
So when presented with a hypothetical scenario that mirrored the defense’s theory in the case — that Dorsey found the boy unconscious and not breathing, and tried for some time to rouse him before handing him over to his mother, who attempted CPR on the drive toward the hospital before flagging down an ambulance — Auer declared it consistent with a case of respiratory arrest.
“No one’s doing anything wrong. Everyone is trying to get the chest wall moving,” Auer testified. “This is the kind of situation I’ve seen in many a history leading to global ischemia.”
Shaken-baby theory rejected
But the CPR did bring further injury to Cameron, said Auer, who attributed many of the boy’s 18 rib fractures in various stages of healing to the aggressive chest compressions administered by his mother and ambulance personnel.
“In such highly charged situations where you’re trying to save a child’s life, you don’t know how hard to press,” Auer said. The older breaks, he added, likely stemmed from Cameron’s “profoundly low” vitamin D levels that weakened his bone density, creating “a setup for fractures that are entirely expected.”
Auer dismissed the prosecution’s allegation that inflicted trauma — the violent shaking — fatally wounded Cameron, noting there were no signs of neck or back injuries one would expect to see in such cases.
“You can’t cause brain damage without causing neck damage,” and such injuries would involve not just shaking but also a rotational head movement that spins the brain on its central axis, Auer testified.
Auer’s findings and those of another defense expert who testifies today, Minneapolis pediatric forensic pathologist Dr. Janet Ophoven, contrast with those of the prosecution’s medical experts who say Cameron succumbed to brain injuries caused by inflicted, nonaccidental trauma.
Those specialists are slated to testify in the trial’s coming weeks. They include Dr. Kevin Coulter, the UCD Medical Center’s chief of general pediatrics, and Dr. Bennet Omalu, a forensic pathologist and neuropathologist at the Med Center whose discovery of chronic traumatic encephalopathy in football players was the focus of the 2015 movie “Concussion.”
— Reach Lauren Keene at lkeene@davisenterprise.net or 530-747-8048. Follow her on Twitter at @laurenkeene
