Larsen ‘did a bad thing’: Crown
By Sue Yanagisawa
Local News - Thursday, October 14, 2004 @ 07:00
Cheryl Larsen is not an abusive person, but she took out her frustrations on
young Brody Albert in December 2002, Crown attorney Bruce Griffith said
yesterday in his closing argument at Larsen’s manslaughter trial.
Larsen – a 33-year-old mother of three – was babysitting 22-month-old Brody
when the toddler suffered what would prove to be fatal injuries.
“In this isolated instance,” Griffith said, Larsen “took it out on Brody
Albert.”
Griffith and assistant Crown Laurie Lacelle made their closing argument
yesterday, wrapping up Larsen’s three-week trial at the Superior Court of
Justice. Final submissions in Larsen’s defence were presented Tuesday by Clyde
Smith, half of the defence team.
Griffith noted that Smith had made it an element of the defence that Larsen was
“simply not the kind of person who would shake a baby boy in her care.”
But “it does happen,” Griffith told the court, “and good people do bad
things.”
“It is our submission that Mrs. Larsen did a bad thing,” Griffith said.
“She shook Brody and he died. She ought to have known better.”
Justice Helen MacLeod has reserved her decision in the case until Dec. 16.
The Alberts and the Larsens are military families. Cheryl Larsen’s husband,
Maj. Mark Larsen, and Brody’s father, Petty Officer 2nd Class Steven Albert,
met while working at CFB Kingston.
Cheryl Larsen was a member of the military for six years and achieved the rank
of corporal working in administrative services before her children were born.
While pregnant with her first son, she applied for the force reduction plan,
however. Since then she’s devoted herself to being a housewife and mother,
except during a brief period when she returned to work for a law firm she had
worked for before she was married. She began babysitting other people’s
children after she and her husband moved to a small community about 50
kilometres from Borden, Ont., and at one time looked after a six-month-old and
two preschool-aged children from other families, in addition to her own young
sons
The Larsens moved to Kingston in the summer of 1998. In 2002, with only her
youngest son not yet in school, she began babysitting Brody Albert.
Larsen made the 911 call shortly after 9 a.m. on Dec. 6, 2002, for the ambulance
that rushed Brody from her home on Pembridge Crescent to Kingston General
Hospital. He had suffered a closed head brain injury and underwent emergency
surgery that morning.
Larsen claimed the boy was injured when he fell down the carpeted basement
stairs to the carpeted basement floor of her home. But the doctors who worked on
Brody rejected that scenario and his injuries were flagged, even before his
death, as consistent with shaken baby syndrome.
Four of the 12 days it took for the evidence to be heard in Larsen’s case were
devoted to testimony from medical experts, four of whom were directly involved
in Brody’s case. A fifth reviewed their findings and concurred with their
diagnosis of shaken baby syndrome.
Only Dr. John J. Plunkett, a certified anatomic, clinical and forensic
pathologist from Minnesota called by the defence, dismissed the possibility of
the boy’s injuries being caused by shaking. Plunkett testified that the
boy’s brain injury could have resulted from a relatively short fall and that
the swelling in his brain accounted for both the hemorrhages in his eyes and
nerve damage that was found on autopsy.
Assistant Crown attorney Lacelle told the court that “it’s certainly the
medical evidence that provides the most fundamental basis that an act of shaking
was responsible” for Brody’s death.
She argued that the willingness of the majority of the medical experts to admit
under defence questioning that other remote possibilities exist doesn’t raise
a reasonable doubt about their diagnosis.
“I think the court should be troubled by a witness who won’t acknowledge
other possibilities,” she said, referring to Plunkett’s rejection of the
existence of shaken baby syndrome.
She also noted that the assistant coroner from Minnesota lacked the pediatrics
credentials and the specialist expertise to challenge the other medical
witnesses.
Lacelle told Justice MacLeod that “certainly it’s possible there was a
fall,” but it didn’t cause Brody’s injuries. She argued that on the
evidence, “the court ought to be satisfied that shaking was the mechanism of
injury in this case, followed by an impact.”
Lacelle added that it’s not necessary for the Crown to prove what the
triggering event was, but it could have been a fall.
Griffith reminded the judge that Larsen had said as much in the latter half of a
3½-hour videotaped interview with a Kingston Police detective the day after
Brody was admitted to hospital.
Larsen’s defence, Griffith said, is predicated on her claim that she never
shook the boy and that when she made statements to police suggesting that she
might have hurt him, “those were basically words put in her mouth” by the
interviewer, Det. Sgt. Carolyn Rice.
He scoffed at the defence claim that Larsen didn’t understand her legal
jeopardy when she agreed to the interview or that she didn’t understand she
was a suspect.
“She knew the night before,” Griffith told the judge, because the boy’s
paternal grandmother told her that police and the Children’s Aid Society would
be called. “If you’re the only adult and you’re the only caregiver when a
baby is injured so badly they might not make it, and you’re called to go to
the police station the next day– nobody is that naive.”
Griffith said that Larsen wasn’t manipulated by the detective and that
Larsen’s account of Brody falling down stairs shows “she’s trying to set
up the theory of an accident.”
He also challenged Larsen’s claim that she wasn’t under any particular
stress in the week before Brody’s death or the morning he was injured. He told
the court that her “anxiousness, frustration and fear is clearly supported by
her own words.”
Reading from the transcript of Larsen’s interview with Rice, he suggested she
demonstrated those emotions when she said “I shook him and I hit his head on
the floor.” When Rice asked her why, she responded, “Because I was scared,
he was being clumsy again.”
She went on to tell the detective that she didn’t want Brody going home with a
fat lip or bruises, and complained that “it’s just everything that happens,
it happens on a Friday when he has to go visiting.”
Larsen told Rice in an interview the next day that she was upset because she
knew the toddler was supposed to visit his paternal grandparents that weekend
and “Steve’s mom has been saying things about me ever since I started
babysitting.”