A doctor who performed an autopsy on a toddler found dead outside an Edmonton church says the child suffered from serious head trauma.
Dr. Elizabeth Brooks-Lim, Alberta’s chief medical examiner, testified on Tuesday at the trial of Tasha-Lee Doreen Mack.
Mack and the child’s father, Joey Crier, are charged with second-degree murder in the 2017 death of 19-month-old Anthony Joseph Raine. A date has not been set for Crier’s trial.
Brooks-Lim said she conducted the autopsy on Anthony after his death.
“I determined the cause of death of this child to be head trauma,” she told court. “The manner of death was determined as a homicide.”
In order to make those findings, she said that she reviewed Anthony’s entire medical history, considered that he was found outside and examined his injuries.
Those included a skull fracture, bruising on the entire front of his face, blood in his right ear canal and bruising to his arms and the front of his chest.
‘Not one simple blow’
“There were multiple impacts to the head of this child because the entirety of his face is bruised,” said Brooks-Lim. “This was not one simple blow to the head.”
She said there was also a blow or multiple blows to the area around his mouth.
Brooks-Lim said there’s no evidence of healing with many of the injuries, which suggests they took place in the minutes, hours or up to a day before he died.
A rib fracture, she said, likely happened about seven to 10 days prior to his death and could have caused difficulty breathing or eating.
Brooks-Lim said the death might have been prevented had the boy received medical attention.
“It’s possible,” she said, explaining that a doctor might have been able to relieve the pressure from the swelling and bleeding around his brain. “That didn’t happen.”
All of those injuries led her to conclude that it was a homicide.
“It’s difficult to imagine how they could have happened in an accidental setting.”
Mack’s lawyer, Ajay Juneja, was to cross examine Brooks-Lim later Tuesday.