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 Erika Mendieta, 33, who has been charged with second-degree murder in the beating death of her toddler, Emmily Lucas, walks outside a Toronto courthouse with lawyer Robert Richardson. (Sun Media/Jack Boland) |
TORONTO -- Emmily Lucas was growing up in her aunt's loving home when her mom re-entered the toddler's life and insisted on taking her for a two-week visit.
Selena Parra didn't feel she could refuse. After all, it had just been a voluntary arrangement and Emmily's paternal aunt had no legal standing.
But two weeks came and went that July 2003 and Erika Mendieta refused to return her daughter to the only home she'd known since she'd been born almost three years before. So Parra went to court to fight for custody.
A hearing date was scheduled for the end of October, but when no judge was available, it was adjourned to Nov. 23, 2003.
But that would be too late.
UNCONSCIOUS
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Emmily was unconscious and barely breathing when she was rushed from her mother's home to the hospital Nov. 13, her little body covered with a shroud of black and blue bruises. She died 10 days later.
Mendieta, 33, is now on trial for the second-degree beating death of her daughter.
As paramedic after paramedic described the bruises staining the child's eyes, ears, stomach, flank, back, shoulders, arms, legs and even groin, Emmily's aunt was in the front row, her body doubled over, tears coursing down her face.
While the accused -- with her long, dark hair pulled back in a ponytail -- sat between her lawyers, betraying no emotion at all.
Parra and her family sat in the front row of the empty University Ave. courtroom, there to bear witness to the disturbing testimony and the 11 graphic photos taken of her niece's extensive injuries.
In an agreed statement of facts, the seven-man, five-woman jury heard that when Mendieta was pregnant with Emmily, her fifth child, she was concerned she couldn't care for yet another baby, especially when the children's father, Derek Parra, was in prison for credit-card fraud. So the newborn came to live with Parra's sister and her husband, and she raised Emmily "as if she was her own child."
But Mendieta would tell investigators that she left her daughter with Parra "not because I wanted to but because there was a whole family against me."
HYSTERICAL CALL
Almost three years later, with a new man in her life, another baby and their own townhouse, she wanted Emmily back.
They had only been reunited four short months when Mendieta made her hysterical 911 call.
"I need an ambulance right away; my little girl, I don't know what's going on with her," she yells in an expeletive-filled recording played for the jury. "My little girl's dying on me."
After arriving at the Flax Gardenway complex near Jane St. and Steeles Ave., paramedics found Mendieta in her driveway waving her arms frantically to gain their attention. She emerged from the car with her unconscious daughter hanging limply in her arms.
Paramedic Mark Peacock said Emmily was in obvious distress with bruises covering her entire cold body, her breathing shallow and her arms rotated in a way that would indicate a serious brain injury.
TRIPPED ON BROOM
Several paramedics testified that Mendieta told them Emmily had been playing with her siblings the day before, had fallen down some stairs and had seemed fine until that afternoon, when she fell asleep and began grinding her teeth as if she might be having an epileptic fit.
She added more details later at Humber River hospital, where Emmily was initially taken.
She told social worker Shelley Aronoff that Emmily had tripped the previous morning on a broom lying on the stairs and landed on her face.
According to her mom, she had said "Ouch" and then jumped right up and appeared fine.
After spending the next afternoon at a Canadian Tire and a grocery store, Emmily was asleep on the couch when her teeth began to chatter and her body stiffen.
When Aronoff questioned the little girl's extensive bruising, she says Mendieta blamed Emmily's siblings.
"It was the older children who were wrestling with her," she told her.
While doctors worked feverishly at Sick Kids hospital trying to revive her daughter, Mendieta repeated a similar explanation in a taped interview with investigating police officers Lorrie Richardson and Philip Perrins.
They didn't buy it.
"She has a very severe brain injury," Richardson told her, "which cannot be explained from the fall that you mentioned."
Mendieta insisted otherwise.
"But you don't understand," she told them, "the kid falls a lot."
The trial continues today before Justice Todd Ducharme -- and like always, Selena Parra vows to be there for her little girl.
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