The defense of accused killer Randy Roden presented a key medical witness Tuesday as it tries to prove a flesh-eating bacterial infection killed 2-year-old Evangelina Wing.
Roden, 28, has been charged with murdering his ex-girlfriend Dorothy Wing’s daughter and abusing her two sons, now 3 and 7, in a Seaside apartment the two shared two years ago. He faces the death penalty if convicted.
The couple called 911 on Dec. 20, 2014, after discovering Wing’s daughter unresponsive. Her two sons were also found injured and taken into protective custody. Prosecutors believe the children were tortured, burned, bitten and caged in the months before Evangelina Wing’s death, in one of the worst cases of child abuse in Clatsop County’s history.
Wing, who pleaded guilty in January to first-degree manslaughter and two counts of first-degree criminal mistreatment, testified last week. In exchange for testifying against Roden, she will receive a plea deal that brings her prison sentence down from a life sentence to approximately 15 years.
An autopsy found the toddler died of battered child syndrome with blunt force trauma to her head. But Roden’s attorney, Conor Huseby, argues that Dorothy Wing caused her daughter’s death through abuse, along with complications from the flesh-eating virus methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus infection, which was found on the children. Huseby has sought to have the case dismissed because signs of the infection were never investigated.
On Tuesday, Huseby called Dr. Janice Ophoven, a Minnesota-based pediatric forensic pathologist hired by defense attorneys to provide expert testimony. Ophoven argued that while Evangelina Wing sustained abuse and neglect, she ultimately succumbed to septicemia, in which a bacterial infection enters the blood stream.
Ophoven disagreed with the state’s autopsy, arguing that some of the marks on Evangelina Wing and her brothers identified as burns were actually lesions from impetigo, a highly contagious skin infection that causes red sores.
“In my opinion, these children were literally covered with these open sores that were infected with bacteria,” she said.
If bacteria enters the blood stream from such sores, she said, the toxins they create can inhibit the body’s ability to maintain blood pressure.
“Children will eventually get to a condition known as irreversible shock,” Ophoven said.
The shock causes the body to lose consciousness, she said, and stops circulation to the brain. “Once you enter irreversible shock, you’re probably going to be gone within a couple hours or so.”
Ophoven said the autopsy should have considered infectious causes of death, taking more samples from the lesions and the heart muscles, on which abscesses were found.
Under questioning by Deputy District Attorney Ron Brown, who is leading the prosecution, Ophoven said her last autopsy was in 2009. She said her last autopsy in a suspected child homicide was in the 1990s. Brown also pointed to an autopsy performed by Ophoven in the 1980s in which she concluded a child died of natural causes, before the mother later admitted that her boyfriend suffocated the child.
Brown led Ophoven through a series of photos showing the marks on the bodies of Evangelina Wing and her two brothers, asking her if it looked like signs of trauma. Ophoven said she agreed there was child abuse, and that trauma played a part in Evangelina Wing’s injuries and death. But she maintained that the toxic bacteria entering the blood stream and leading to irreversible shock caused her death.
There should have been an infectious autopsy performed, she said, looking at things under a microscope instead of with the naked eye. “You have to look at it scientifically. We (forensic pathologists) are not supposed to speculate.”