Thursday, 4:30 PM
Trial begins of Hyde Park mother on neglect charges
By John R. Ellement, Globe Staff , and Andrew Ryan, Globe Correspondent
When emergency workers arrived at the Hyde Park home of a 13-year-old suffering from a massive infection in August 2005, the girl lay on a couch wearing a pair of diapers, too listless to walk up the stairs to the bathroom. She had lost so much weight all of her ribs were visible through her skin and the tendons on her neck stood out.
"She was very, very sick looking," said Donald Efstathiou, an emergency medical technician, who testified in Suffolk Superior Court today. "She was emaciated. Malnourished. She just wasn't right."
The girl, who the Globe is not identifying because of her age, survived the ordeal after a series of surgeries and a long hospitalization. The trial of her mother, Deborah Robinson, 39, began today on a felony charge of wantonly and recklessly permitting substantial injury to a child and a misdemeanor count of child endangerment.
Robinson pleaded not guilty to the charges at her arraignment last year. If convicted, she faces a maximum of almost eight years in prison.
Assistant District Attorney David Deakin said in his opening arguments this morning that Robinson was responsible for letting her daughter waste away from an infection from a botched belly piercing.
"Even after buying diapers for her 13 year old daughter ... she did not get medical attention of any kind" for her daughter, Deakin told the jury.
Defense attorney Janet Macnab said in her opening remarks that the jury was going to hear a story "about poverty, ignorance and of a single mother with two children trying to do the best she could do with very little resources."
The 13-year-old girl and her brother both plan to testify on behalf of her mother, Macnab said.
Another witness, paramedic Leonard Shubitowski, told jurors today that when they tried to treat the girl, she was so dehydrated that they had to place an IV in a vein in her foot.
There were, however, also signs that the girl was being cared for, Shubitowski testified. When paramedics arrived, the girl had been recently washed and her diapers were clean except for discharge from the hole in her stomach that was infected.
