WOODLAND — Darnell Dorsey admits he’s no angel.
Speaking out for the first time in his fatal child assault trial, Dorsey acknowledged Monday his past convictions for having sex with a minor, beating up a roommate and robbing a man of his backpack and cell phone while riding in a stolen golf cart.
Darnell Dorsey appears in Yolo Superior Court to face charges in the death of his girlfriend’s son, Cameron Morrison. Sue Cockrell/Enterprise photo
But he insists that police and prosecutors have it all wrong when they say he shook, hit and kicked his girlfriend’s toddler son, inflicting the traumatic injuries that resulted in the boy’s death.
“On Jan. 22, 2014, did you brutally assault Cameron Morrison?” Deputy Public Defender Martha Sequeira asked Dorsey seconds after he took the witness stand in Yolo Superior Court, where an enlarged photo of the smiling 20-month-old boy was displayed on a screen across the room.
“Absolutely not,” Dorsey, 24, told the jury.
For the next two hours, Sequeira walked Dorsey through his relationship with Veronica Rix, a fellow high school student with whom Dorsey fathered a son, Cameron’s older half-brother, in 2011. The couple later parted ways, but reunited in 2013, the year after Rix had Cameron with another man.
Dorsey admitted initially shirking his responsibilities with his son, blaming his young age at the time, but said he’d turned a corner by the time he moved in with Rix and the two boys on Olive Drive in Davis in May 2013.
“It was exciting,” Dorsey said of his new role, where he cared for the boys and attended school while Rix worked to support the family. “It made me happy. It gave me purpose, something to strive for, to do better for.”
Dorsey denied feeling any resentment toward Cameron because they were not related by blood. But he said he realized at one point he was showing more affection toward his biological son and made more of an effort to treat Cameron as his own.
‘I shook him’
Jan. 22, 2014, started out with a typical routine, according to Dorsey. He said he dropped the boys with Rix’s mother in West Sacramento that morning, retrieving them at 3 p.m. after attending classes at Sacramento City College.
Cameron, sick with what appeared to be a cold, “was making this weird sound” and wasn’t eating much, Dorsey recalled.
Cameron Morrison was 20 months old when he died in January 2014. Courtesy photo
Dorsey’s attorneys contend Cameron suffered from a severe bout of pneumonia that went undetected until it was too late, sending the boy into respiratory distress and cardiac arrest that caused the fatal swelling and hemorrhaging of his brain.
“In retrospect, I can see there were signs he needed medical attention,” Dorsey testified. Instead, he took the boys home for their naps.
They woke around 6:30 p.m., and Rix prepared dinner for them after she got home from work. She was back out the door several hours later to go to the gym with her two aunts.
Despite being ill himself at the time, Dorsey insisted he had no problem being left to watch the kids again. “She wanted to feel good about herself, and that was fine with me,” he said.
He recalled leaving the boys on the living-room floor to finish their dinners while he smoked marijuana and watched TV in an adjacent bedroom.
When he emerged a short time later, “I looked, and Cameron’s just laying there” face up on the floor, Dorsey said, weeping. He said he patted the boy’s face and called his name several times, but got no response.
Thinking the boy might be choking on food, “I shook him, and I pat his back,” Dorsey said. He said he took Cameron into the bathroom and splashed water on his face, but “nothing’s working, and he gasps a couple of times.”
Dorsey said he then tried CPR, delivering compressions to the boy’s chest, but stopped after a few seconds because “I didn’t know what to do.” With Cameron cradled against his chest, he ran across the road to Rix’s parents’ house and pounded on the door, then ran back when no one answered.
At that point, Rix returned home from the gym to find Dorsey holding an unconscious Cameron in his arms. She whisked the boy away in the car and also tried CPR before flagging down an ambulance parked down the street.
Cameron arrived at Sutter Davis Hospital with 18 rib fractures, a lacerated liver and other internal injuries, and the defense says it was the untrained CPR efforts — and not Dorsey gripping or squeezing — that accounted for those wounds.
Police arrested Dorsey later that night after doctors raised concerns that Cameron’s injuries appeared consistent with child abuse.
Though he denies harming Cameron, Dorsey said he still feels a sense of guilt because “there were signs that he was sick, and I didn’t pay attention.”
Believing his arrest was merely for shaking the boy to rouse him, Dorsey said he didn’t understand the full nature of the allegations against him for more than a year after officers took him into custody.
“I’m accused of a very vicious attack, and that absolutely did not happen — at all,” he said.
Cross-examination
Deputy District Attorney Michelle Serafin, meanwhile, wasn’t buying it. She began her cross-examination of Dorsey by scrutinizing his drug use and past lies to police, and suggested he created an alternate “persona” that would appeal to the jury.
Serafin also wanted to know why, despite describing himself as a “family man,” Dorsey filled his social media feeds with photos of shoes and cars but not the two little boys.
“It was kind of a transition to me, and I didn’t want people to ask questions at that time,” Dorsey said. “My friends knew. Everyone that I loved knew.”
Turning to the night Cameron was hospitalized, Serafin noted that Monday was the first time Dorsey mentioned that the toddler hadn’t been eating — a detail he never passed along to doctors or investigating officers.
If he wasn’t eating, Serafin asked, why did Dorsey think he was choking?
The boy had nibbled on small bits of food, replied Dorsey, who denied Serafin’s suggestion that he got angry with Cameron for not eating his dinner.
Serafin also posed several questions that implied Dorsey struck Cameron in the face — accounting for bruising to his cheek — and cut his lip, which led Dorsey to wash the boy’s bloodied face and dry it with tissues that police later found crumpled in the trash.
“Where did all the blood come from?” Serafin asked.
“I have no idea,” Dorsey said. Asked about the bloodstained T-shirt that Rix’s brother reported finding on the floor a few days later, “I don’t know if that was mine or what.”
As for his initial statement to police that he “shook the s—” out of Cameron after finding him unconscious, Dorsey said investigators took the comment out of context and “made me feel like I had done something wrong.”
“And you believed it,” Serafin said.
“Yes,” Dorsey replied. “Today, I know the difference, and what has been explained is a lot different than what I did, and that’s the weirdest part about all of this.”
— Reach Lauren Keene at lkeene@davisenterprise.net or 530-747-8048. Follow her on Twitter at @laurenkeene