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George Christopher Edmonds admitted on tape to killing his son. Whether he intended to is the issue.
By BILL DURYEA
© St. Petersburg Times, published October 9, 2002
TAMPA -- The infant's crying filled the cramped trailer home, and the hulking father could do nothing to quiet him.
George Christopher Edmonds tried to feed the child a bottle, but Christopher threw up. He pushed a pacifier in his mouth, but the baby spat it out. He burped him, changed his diaper, but nothing worked for a child who had been sickly and fussy all his life. Christopher began to wail. His father screamed back loudly in his face.
In the end, the only thing that silenced Christopher was when his father slammed his head into a door -- the second time.
No one disputes that Edmonds, a 33-year-old carnival worker and oil change journeyman, killed his son March 20; he admitted it on tape. At issue is whether he intended to do it, as prosecutors allege, or whether, as the defense argues, it was an accident committed by a man still suffering the effects of his first son's traumatic death two years before.
The first day of testimony in Edmonds' trial on charges of first-degree murder and aggravated child abuse ended with Edmonds' own vivid, taped description of the last moments of his son's life on March 20.
The jury heard Edmonds talk about how he came home from an "aggravating day," how he napped on the couch while his girlfriend did the laundry, how later he smoked a $10 rock of crack cocaine while Christopher and his 4-year-old stepson were asleep.
Sometime after midnight, during the Conan O'Brien show, Christopher woke up crying and Edmonds lost his temper.
Edmonds described on the tape how he wrapped his large hands around his son's tiny chest and lifted him up in the air, shook him and slammed his head into a door.
"Did he keep crying?" asked Hillsborough Sheriff's Detective Anthony Miller.
"Yes," Edmonds said. "I did it twice."
He went to sleep, he said, and several hours later woke to find his son was not breathing. He tried to do CPR based on what he had seen on television. Instead of calling 911, Edmonds called his girlfriend, April Carter, who works the night shift at Target in the Brandon Town Center Mall.
"He told me, "The baby's not breathing' and to get my butt home," Carter, 26, testified.
She arrived at the trailer on E Causeway Boulevard to find Christopher "very cold and limp," she said. Carter tried artificial resuscitation as Edmonds sped toward Brandon Regional Hospital, but she had no success.
Nurses and doctors trying to revive the child watched as his head began to swell. The delayed reaction was the effect, authorities say, of artificial respiration permitting the resumption of a function that had stopped earlier when the baby had stopped breathing.
"What's wrong with his head?" a nurse asked Edmonds, who was pacing frantically around the emergency room.
"In my hurry I may have bumped his head on the door," nurse Vicky Faught testified she heard him answer.
An autopsy the next day showed Christopher had two skull fractures, 63 rib fractures -- some of them old -- and a lacerated liver, according to prosecutors. Some of these fractures were visible on X-rays taken of Christopher during a previous stay at the hospital for dehydration, but the radiologist did not detect them at the time.
Confronted with the autopsy information, Edmonds changed the story he had given the day before, in which he said he returned from the bathroom to find his son inexplicably unconscious.
On the tape of his final interview, Edmonds can be heard sobbing loudly. Listening to himself Tuesday, Edmonds wiped tears from his eyes as he sat at the defense table.
"I wasn't trying to hurt him," Edmonds said on the tape. "I just thought he might stop crying."
Miller pressed him on why he didn't call 911 if he didn't think he had done anything wrong.
"I believe you didn't call 911 because you were beginning to believe you had something to do with it," Miller said.
When the defense presents its case beginning today, it is expected to argue that Edmonds developed posttraumatic stress disorder from watching his first son, Austin, get crushed by a carnival tractor in May, 2000.
"The premeditated killing of his son is an absurd allegation," defense attorney Kenneth Littman said in his opening. "He had no intent to harm or kill his son. It was an accident caused by his mental illness."