WOODLAND — Darnell Dorsey admitted to Davis police officers he slapped and shook his girlfriend’s son Cameron Morrison, but said he did so only after finding the toddler unconscious on the living-room floor.
“I shook the s–t out of him — I’m not gonna lie,” Dorsey, who said he thought Cameron was choking, told Officer Eric Labbe in an audio recording played last week in Yolo Superior Court. “I didn’t know what to do at all.”
Darnell Dorsey appears in Yolo Superior Court to face charges in the death of his girlfriend’s son, Cameron Morrison. Sue Cockrell/Enterprise photo
As he spoke, Dorsey demonstrated how he shook Cameron, according to Labbe, who stood up and curled his fingers on both hands as if gripping something from the sides, then thrust them back and forth in a forceful shaking motion.
“I can tell you that when he did that motion, he looked angry,” Labbe testified Thursday at Dorsey’s trial on charges that he fatally assaulted Cameron while caring for the boy and his older half-brother on Jan. 22, 2014.
Labbe also noted that while Cameron’s mother Veronica Rix was clearly distraught over her son’s condition, Dorsey “was calm, stoic, emotionless.” Later, Labbe witnessed Dorsey arguing with members of Rix’s family in the hospital waiting room.
Dorsey told Labbe in the audio recording that after shaking Cameron he splashed water on the boy’s face and, when that failed to rouse him, attempted to wake his girlfriend’s parents in their Olive Drive home about 100 feet away.
Rix arrived home a short time later and took Cameron away in a relative’s car, flagging down an ambulance down the street.
“He’s been sick, but I didn’t think anything like this would happen,” said Dorsey, who spoke to Labbe near the emergency room of Sutter Davis Hospital as doctors worked furiously to save Cameron’s life. “You think that medicine might have done something?”
But Dorsey’s story didn’t ring true to police detectives, who arrested him in connection with Cameron’s injuries at about 2 a.m. Jan. 23, as Sutter staff prepared to transfer the boy to the UC Davis Medical Center’s pediatric intensive care unit.
By then, doctors had noted the boy was suffering from severe brain swelling, multiple broken ribs and internal injuries. He died two days later.
“Those aren’t injuries that small children get by accident,” Davis police Detective John Evans, who took Dorsey into custody at Sutter, testified Friday. Having recently undergone training on child-abuse investigations, “I was taught it was not uncommon for the perpetrator to be the boyfriend of the mother, not the biological father.”
Dorsey’s defense attorneys contend Cameron’s death stemmed from a severe and undetected bout of pneumonia, which sent him into respiratory distress and cardiac arrest, and that doctors and law-enforcement officers misinterpreted the resulting injuries as abuse-related trauma.
Cameron Morrison was 20 months old when he died in January 2014. Courtesy photo
But according to Evans, investigators took into account the fact that Cameron was “OK” when his mother left the family’s mobile home to work out at a gym, “and when she returned, he was not.”
Evans said the investigation continued for several months following Dorsey’s arrest, involving the entire Davis Police Department detectives’ division and frequent briefings about the status of the probe.
Under cross-examination, Evans said investigators did not explore the criminal history of Cameron’s maternal grandmother, Tracy Rix, a convicted drug dealer who had cared for the boys for several hours on the day Cameron was hospitalized.
Tracy Rix testified earlier in the trial that Cameron, who was feverish and vomiting that day, cried when Dorsey picked him up from her West Sacramento home.
“The investigation you did was to get every damaging piece of information about this man right here, right?” Deputy Public Defender Martha Sequeira asked Evans, gesturing toward Dorsey.
“No,” Evans replied.
“What suspects did you investigate other than Darnell Dorsey?” Sequeira asked.
Said Evans: “There wasn’t anything that pointed toward any other suspect.”
— Reach Lauren Keene at lkeene@davisenterprise.net or 530-747-8048. Follow her on Twitter at @laurenkeene