Morgue (26 page)

Kevin, then twenty-four, was the oldest of seven kids. His father was a federal worker and his mom worked in child protective services. His parents ran a tight ship, but they trusted Kevin implicitly, often leaving him in charge of the other kids. There'd never been any problems.

He grew up mostly in a Boston suburb, where he was a track and football star in high school and kept a 3.4 grade average. He learned to play the piano at music camp, and also became fluent in Spanish and Portuguese. He attended church regularly with his family. After graduation, he enrolled in John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City, with a dream of becoming a US marshal or a detective.

There he met a young woman, who was soon pregnant. To support his new family, he dropped out of college in 2006 and worked a year as a prison guard before separating from his wife and two young sons. He joined the Marines in 2007, still hoping to become a cop.

After his basic training and schooling, he was stationed at the Marine Corps' Mountain Warfare Training Center in Bridgeport, California, a small town two and a half hours south of Reno. When he had liberty, he'd always drive toward the bright lights of Reno, where a friend introduced him to nineteen-year-old Kanesia Dean. This single, young mother captivated him, but he also fell immediately in love with her two-year-old son named Malakai.

And very quickly after they started dating, Kanesia got pregnant again. Kevin didn't just want to do the right thing. He genuinely loved Kanesia and her little boy, and he wanted a family, too. He asked her to marry him not out of obligation, but out of genuine hope for the future.

They checked Kanesia out of the hospital and drove to a favorite Mexican diner for supper. But they had barely settled into their chairs when Malakai turned lethargic and quiet. Then he vomited. And vomited again. Kevin and Kanesia scooped up the sick child and rushed home.

At home, it only got worse. Kanesia was sure that Malakai had caught the stomach bug that had wreaked havoc in the house that week, so she put him in her bed, hoping his little body could fight it off. But he continued to vomit through the evening. It was so bad Kevin changed the bedsheets and Malakai's pajamas more than once.

At bedtime, Kevin and Kanesia crawled into bed beside Malakai

Around 11:20 p.m., Kanesia instinctively reached out and touched Malakai. He wasn't breathing.

She screamed in the dark. Kevin leapt up and began CPR on the little boy right on the bed while Kanesia frantically dialed 911.

Soon Grandma rushed in from the other room and took charge. She roughly shoved Kevin out of the way. She straddled Malakai's unbreathing body on the soft bed and began a manic, forceful attempt to save her beloved grandson, pushing, thumping, and puffing with every fiber of her being, hoping to revive him.

Paramedics arrived within minutes, but it was too late.

Malakai was dead.

*   *   *

The next day, Malakai's little body, still in his soiled pajamas, was autopsied while the medical examiner's investigators tried to piece together what happened.

Grandma pointed a finger directly at Kevin Hunt. She said Malakai was always subdued around Kevin, who thought the child was babied by the women in the house. The day before, she said, the usually effervescent boy didn't want to go with Kevin at the salon. And she now suspected the child's injuries were not from an accidental fall, but from a beating by Kevin.

In the morgue, Dr. Piotr Kubiczek autopsied the child under the watchful gaze of two Sparks detectives and a deputy DA, who feared this might be murder.

Dr. Kubiczek saw the bruising and scrapes on Malakai's right temple and cheek. He noted a patterned bruise—including two parallel marks about the width of fingers that were emerging postmortem—that looked like it might have been created by an adult's hand slap. The child's diaper was stained with pink urine, suggesting blood in his bladder. He found other bruising on the boy's chest and back.

Inside, Dr. Kubiczek found more damage. Malakai's pancreas, spleen, and the tissues of his abdominal wall, all of which had seeped almost a pint of blood into the child's belly. His kidneys, bladder, and intestines were bruised. He also found a purplish-gray embolus—in this case, a large blood clot thicker than a wine cork—bulging in the arteries leading to Malakai's lungs, but didn't believe it was involved in the child's death. No effort was made to determine where it came from.

Dr. Kubiczek would later describe Malakai's internal wounds as similar to injuries from a multistory fall or a high-speed car crash. They happened within minutes or a few hours before death, he said, and would have been immediately painful, almost crippling.

Finding no other troubling evidence—all other organs were normal, he said—Dr. Kubiczek ruled that Malakai Dean died because his vital organs had been violently ruptured and leaked blood until the child died.

“It is my opinion,” Dr. Kubiczek wrote in his autopsy report, “that the death of Malakai Dean is due to multiple blunt force injuries of the abdomen. The manner of death is homicide.”

*   *   *

Three weeks later, Kevin Anthony Hunt was arrested for child abuse resulting in murder. If convicted, he could serve the rest of his life in prison.

In two lengthy interviews by police, Kevin—who had never been in any trouble before—told the same story: He'd spent less than forty minutes alone with Malakai, who'd fallen from a playground slide but didn't seem to have been hurt seriously. Defense lawyer David Houston, who'd known a few liars in his time, felt Kevin was either one of the best liars he'd ever seen, or he was telling the truth.

But cops and prosecutors had a different theory: During those forty minutes with Malakai, Kevin had beaten him, mortally damaging his internal organs and causing some superficial bruising on his face. He was lying about the playground fall, they said. And the abuse had probably been going on for a while, they believed.

When a child dies, a family bears the unimaginable weight of the emotional suffering, but nobody escapes unharmed. Not the accused, not first responders, not cops, not medical examiners, not prosecutors, not defense lawyers, not judges. And not a community.

When race is introduced, the anger is often amplified. Races can be suspicious of each other in places where there's little mixing.

And Kevin Hunt was black in mostly white Reno.

The local reaction to Malakai's death was swift. Some wept, some cried for retribution. Most reader comments posted on local media stories and blogs ran a very short gauntlet from astonishing fury to naked racism. Some Internet trolls called for a lynching.

Houston, who'd grown up in Washington, DC, and was one of Reno's celebrity litigators, stepped in to help. Something didn't add up, and he thought Kevin was unfairly accused. He represented some big Hollywood clients just so he could afford to take cases like this one.

After a local forensic pathologist found multiple errors in Dr. Kubiczek's autopsy, Houston called me. He soon sent a robust packet containing the complete autopsy, photos, investigative reports, and slides containing tissues samples collected from Malakai Dean—everything I'd need to evaluate the case.

America is a funny place sometimes. Our mantra is “innocent until proven guilty,” but in child deaths, we often go through the looking glass: The accused is secretly presumed guilty and the defense must prove him innocent. In such cases, jurors often think with their hearts, not their brains. We all want justice for innocents, of course, but we must guard against being blinded by our zeal to get it.

Many of my greatest cases have been child deaths, but as a private consultant, I rarely take them. Every so often, though, I see a blatant injustice and I can't turn away. Some things just leap out. I quickly saw clues that had been missed.

That's why I took Kevin Hunt's case.

When the trial began two years later, the scene had been set for a forensic showdown. On one side was the original medical examiner, who had corrected many of his errors; on the other side were a couple of forensic pathologists, including me, who saw something he didn't. But the prosecution still wanted to punish a baby killer, and pursued Kevin with a special animosity, despite their largely circumstantial case.

In the meantime, while Kevin sat in the Washoe County Jail, Kanesia gave birth to their son, Jaiden.

When the trial began in early May of 2012, Malakai's relatives, including Kanesia, stood firm in their conviction that he'd been beaten to death by Kevin. They recounted the sad series of events leading up to the boy's death. Kevin's father sat in the courtroom every day, and some days, some of Kevin's uniformed Marine comrades attended the proceedings.

Dr. Kubiczek took the stand to explain his conclusions that Kevin Hunt had murdered Malakai. The bruises and scrapes on the boy's face and head. The split-open organs. The blood pooled in his abdomen. It must have all sounded grimly logical to the jury.

But there was a different story to be told when I took the stand.

For one, the scrapes and bruises on Malakai's face and head were ordinary classic playground injuries, common in falls. A big-city ME's office sees them regularly. The most specific thing that can be said about such injuries is that they are caused by impacts (falls, blows, etc.), but where some investigators saw evidence of a slap, I saw only marks left by paramedic's tape that might have been holding a mask or tube on the boy's face.

In short, I saw nothing that I could say was caused by a beating.

The wounds to Malakai's internal organs were serious, but they didn't cause him to bleed to death. At most, Malakai lost only about 28 or 29 percent of his total blood volume, and he could have tolerated almost twice as much.

More important, though, they weren't inflicted during the brief time the child was alone with Kevin Hunt seven hours before.

How do I know? Such injuries would have been extremely painful and caused almost immediate shock, but in the hours immediately following the park visit, Malakai showed none of the signs of shock (profuse sweating, dizziness, weakness, thirst, shallow breathing, blue lips or fingernails, clammy skin, among them). Even if shock were somehow delayed, he would have exhibited unmistakable symptoms before eight p.m. that night. He didn't.

Here's another point: Dr. Kubiczek's autopsy found nothing unusual about two-year-old Malakai's heart weighing 115 grams. In fact, his heart was grossly enlarged, about the size of a normal nine-year-old's heart. Malakai's heart should have been about half as large.

So what? If he had lived, Malakai would have suffered severe medical problems in the future. Even at his young age, it's likely that his enlarged heart wasn't able to adequately pump blood throughout his body, especially to his legs. That, in turn, probably led to the formation of blood clots in his lower extremities.

I believe one of those clots—so large that it must have formed over a period of days or weeks, not hours—broke loose from a vein and traveled to Malakai's heart. There it plugged the pulmonary artery, which carries blood from the heart to the lungs, and he died when his blood-starved lungs ceased to function.

The clot could not have been created by any alleged beating seven hours before. It was too big and couldn't have formed that quickly. It also could not have originated in Malakai's abdomen, where only one blood vessel is large enough to carry it, and no such evidence was found.

But here was the clincher for me: The lacerated organs showed no inflammation.

Inflammation is the body's attempt to defend itself from trauma, whether mechanical, chemical, or infectious. When tissue is injured in any way, its cells release two groups of chemical compounds. One of them causes local blood vessels to dilate, allowing damaging fluid to escape. The other attracts white blood cells to the area of the injury to break up and consume injured cells and begin the repair process.

In the abdomen, this happens almost immediately. Within two or three hours, abdominal injuries are inflamed as the body rushes to fix its problems.

In Malakai Dean's case, there was no inflammation. Even seven hours after the alleged fatal trauma to his internal organs, no inflammation.

How is that possible? It means only one thing: The trauma that caused those injuries was done around the time of death, probably after the child had died.

The damage to Malakai's organs was not caused by a beating by Kevin Hunt or anyone else. It wasn't caused by foul play of any kind.

In my opinion, two-year-old Malakai Dean died of natural causes when a blood clot, probably caused by poor circulation from his enlarged heart, caused his lungs to stop breathing.

The organ damage that cops and prosecutors attributed to a beating by an abusive boyfriend were, in fact, caused by his grandmother's desperate but inept CPR attempts upon a soft bed (instead of the firm floor, where professionals are taught to position patients). Malakai was already dead when Kanesia discovered he wasn't breathing. Thankfully never felt the intense pain his would-be rescue would have inflicted. He was already gone.

*   *   *

But these cases are never quite as easy as all that.

The jury eventually deadlocked 6–6, unable to reach a verdict. Given the highly charged nature of the case, and the natural prejudice against accused child abusers, it was a victory for Kevin Hunt.

Now the prosecution was in a pickle. It knew the conflicting medical evidence—including dozens of admitted errors by the medical examiner—made a second trial just as treacherous, so the state offered Kevin a deal: Plead guilty to voluntary manslaughter in return for four to ten years in prison, with credit for nearly four years he'd already served in county jail.

But the defense's pickle was no less tricky. Public opinion, lingering anger, and barely concealed racism made an acquittal dicey. If the choice was between a black kid with an imperfect story and a big city's investigative, forensic, and legal system, the jury might fracture. Winning outright seemed unlikely; losing sent Kevin Anthony Hunt to prison for life.