Doctors provide conflicting analyses from toddler's autopsy during murder trial

Lucas County Coroner Thomas Blomquist and one of his office’s former deputy coroners agreed in court testimony Thursday that a 3-year-old boy’s October, 2022, death was caused by severe head and neck trauma, but they differed on whether he was a homicide victim.

Dr. Blomquist, who was a deputy coroner when he performed the autopsy on Declan Hill, likened the boy’s dislocated neck ligaments to the injuries he often sees on unrestrained car occupants involved in freeway crashes and denied any possibility that or his head trauma could have been caused by a fall in his Sylvania Township home.

But Dr. Maneesha Pandey, who now is in private practice as a forensic pathologist after working in the Lucas County Coroner’s Office for 10 years, said in a video deposition that while the neck and head injuries were the cause of death, she would have ruled the manner of death as “undetermined” because the autopsy did not show to sufficient certainty whether it was the result of homicide or an accident.

Both Dr. Pandey and Kenneth Monson, an associate professor of biomechanical engineering from the University of Utah who also testified Thursday afternoon as a defense witness for Michael Kitto, said their reviews did not prove Declan’s death was an accident.

But Mr. Monson told the Lucas County Common Pleas Court jury that research into the effects of physical force on the human body has shown a possibility — albeit a slight one — that the explanation Mr. Kitto gave investigators for his girlfriend’s son’s death was true.

Mr. Kitto, 33, of Saline, Mich., is charged before Judge Linda Jennings with aggravated murder, murder, felonious assault, and child endangerment for Declan’s death Oct. 7, 2022. The death was one day after paramedics arrived at the King Road home Mr. Kitto and Kelley McEwen then shared to find the boy not breathing and without a pulse after a 911 call from Mr. Kitto.

Mr. Kitto, who was babysitting the boy while Ms. McEwen worked her second day at a new job, told first responders and investigators that while he and the boy played in the house, Declan ran headlong into the end of a door, then fell backward and hit his head on the floor. After standing up again, he collapsed, the boyfriend said in statements recorded on body camera video previously shown as evidence.

Dr. Blomquist, who on the trial’s third day was the prosecution’s last witness, said that while one or two of the boy’s injuries could have occurred as described, “that story does not explain the injuries I saw.”

The boy had bruising in seven places on his head, and, while four of them were close enough together that they could have been caused by the same impact, the others could not and one of them covered much of the left side of his face, the coroner said.

Damage to soft tissues around the joint between Declan’s skull and highest spinal vertebra, meanwhile, and hemorrhaging along the optic nerves from the boy’s eyes also indicated violent forces at work, Dr. Blomquist said.

The neck damage, he said, was akin to what he usually sees “in high-speed motor vehicle accidents.”

But Mr. Monson, the first defense witness, said that based on Declan’s size and a statistical average placement of his center of gravity, the boy’s head could have hit the floor at an impact velocity of 10.6 mph. The resulting force, he said, produced a 5 percent chance of causing life-threatening injury.

Children — and adults, for that matter — “seldom suffer severe injury in short falls,” but there are examples, including one captured on video of a 2-year-old who was killed by such a fall, Mr. Monson said.

“It is physically possible,” the biomechanical engineer said while acknowledging that “other events could also have caused these injuries.”

“It cannot be ascertained accurately how the injuries occurred,” Dr. Pandey later said under her recorded direct examination.

The video of her cross-examination by prosecutors is to be played when the trial resumes Friday morning.

Earlier in the day, Ms. McEwen testified that she hadn’t noticed any of the marks that later appeared on her son’s head and neck when she put him to bed the night before, but also said Mr. Kitto, who had lived at her house since the previous spring, had shown no aversion to the boy’s somewhat difficult potty training or any inclination of anger toward him at all.

But while Mr. Kitto was initially eager for updates about the boy’s condition — police questioning had kept him from going to the hospital — Ms. McEwen said that communication from him ended after a text message the following evening, after the boy’s ventilator had been turned off early that afternoon.

And besides his intentional messages, Mr. Kitto also accidentally sent her an audio clip of a conversation between him and his mother in which he broached the possibility of leaving Ohio — and possibly the country — because of the investigative heat, even though he maintained his innocence.

Mr. Kitto was arrested in Michigan two days after the boy’s death once the coroner’s office had ruled it a homicide.

Ms. McEwen acknowledged under cross-examination, however, that she had not answered any of the voice or text messages Mr. Kitto had left her during the crisis because “I was dealing with my son who was brain dead.”