Trial Ordered for Man Accused of Blinding Infant by Shaking Him

A Ventura man was ordered Wednesday to stand trial for allegedly shaking his infant son so violently that the boy was left permanently blind.

Donald Ray Boyd, 22, sat impassively as Municipal Judge Charles W. Campbell Jr. said there was enough evidence for Boyd to stand trial on felony and misdemeanor child-abuse charges.

The trial was ordered after a Ventura County district attorney’s investigator, Harvey Taylor, testified that Boyd had admitted shaking his son, then 3-month-old Jacob Lee Payne, on Sept. 27.

Boyd and Jacob’s mother, Cynthia Payne, were house-sitting at a Ventura home while the residents were on vacation, Taylor said. Payne went to work and Boyd was looking after Jacob, who was lying on a couch.

“He admitted to shaking the baby for 20 to 30 seconds because he had cried all morning and would not stop crying,” the investigator testified. When he stopped shaking the infant, Boyd laid him back on the couch.

The crying stopped, Boyd told Taylor.

“That surprised him,” Taylor said. “He said he was worried about the baby, knew he had done something wrong.” The father then knelt next to the couch, patted his son on the head and said he was sorry, he told Taylor.

When Payne arrived home from work at 6 p.m., she found her son limp and apparently sleeping, Taylor said. She took him to a neighbor’s house, who took the mother and child to Community Memorial Hospital in Ventura. Eventually the child was airlifted to Children’s Hospital in Los Angeles.

Doctors said the baby “was a classic example of a shaken infant,” Taylor said. They found blood in the brain and said the retinas of the eyes had detached.

Still less than a year old, Jacob Lee Payne will be blind for life, the physicians said, and he may have suffered brain damage.

The retina is the part of the eye that picks up light impulses from the lens and translates them into electrical stimuli, which the optic nerve reads and transmits to the brain.

“The retina is almost a part of the brain,” said Dr. Brian Prestwich, a physician at the county-operated West Ventura clinic. “It directly connects the brain with the optic nerve.”

Unlike the lens or cornea, which sometimes can be replaced, retinas that are entirely separated from the optic nerve usually cannot be reattached, Prestwich said.

In addition to the alleged blinding of his son, which has been charged as a felony, Boyd faces a misdemeanor child-abuse charge stemming from an incident about a month earlier.

Claudia Goldner testified that she was attending the Ventura County Fair with friends on Aug. 24 when she noticed a man leaning over a baby’s stroller, flicking his forefinger on the baby’s cheeks and then jabbing a bottle into its face.

“Then he stood up, reached back and slapped the baby across the face,” Goldner said, waving her arm to illustrate the blow.

She said she turned to her friend, Toni Techau, and said “That’s it.” She went looking for two police officers she had seen earlier, she said, leaving Techau to keep an eye on the man, whom she identified as Boyd.

Techau testified that Boyd continued flicking his thumb and forefinger and kept on shoving the bottle into the baby’s face.

She said she finally intervened when Boyd started shaking the stroller.

“I told him there was no need to shake it so violently,” Techau said. Boyd said nothing but stopped shaking the stroller, she said.

The women testified that the police arrived about the same time as the baby’s mother, who had been riding the double Ferris wheel.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Michael K. Frawley said the officers did not have sufficient cause to arrest Boyd at the time. They took his name, however, and it appeared during a records search when he was arrested last September.

The officers did not take the names of the women who witnessed the fair incident, however. Frawley said they were located through a newspaper ad.

Boyd was arrested the night his son was taken to the hospital last year, but was released a few days later because investigators said they had not gathered enough evidence to charge him. He moved to New Hampshire but stayed in contact with Ventura County authorities, officials said.

He was arrested again in mid-March and is being held on $15,000 bail in Ventura County Jail. He will be arraigned May 22 before Superior Court Judge Allan L. Steele. If convicted, he could face up to seven years in prison.

A foster family is taking care of Jacob, Frawley said, until the county’s Public Social Services Agency decides who should have custody.