New Trial Will Delve Into the Mystery of Boy’s Death

Smiling, cooing babies aren’t supposed to fall unconscious and die after parents leave them at the sitter’s. But in 1990, two baby boys died within three months while in the care of PTA president and unlicensed sitter Debra Suzanne Cummings.

Since then, the criminal justice system has struggled to resolve whether the deaths were a tragic coincidence or murder.

During its protracted journey through Van Nuys Superior Court, the Cummings case has been an ordeal for everyone involved--the boys’ families, Cummings herself, even the jurors whose heated deliberations two years ago produced insults and hard feelings but no verdict.

“You don’t think I haven’t looked at myself in the mirror and said, ‘Why two children?’ ” Cummings, now 36, said recently, speaking at length about the case for the first time.

“It’s so horrible.”

Toni Majoy-Young, the mother of 9-month-old Kevin Young, the second child to die in Cummings’ care, said this week in an interview: “All I know is that when I dropped Kevin off that morning, he was alive and well. When I picked him up, he was unconscious and dying.”

She has told her story many times. In February, she gave an eloquent statement to her most influential audience yet--a congressional subcommittee investigating the quality and availability of affordable child care.

Majoy-Young told the subcommittee she still wonders if her firstborn son suffered during his short life because she entrusted him to a stranger who advertised “Loving Child Care in My Home” for $75 a week. At the time, she thought Cummings “was the answer to my prayers. She was the president of the PTA. She impressed me.”

It is a dilemma many working parents face. Child care, a $20-billion-a-year industry, is one of the country’s fastest-growing small businesses. About 12 million children nationwide are in full- or part-time day care. Only about 15% are in licensed homes or centers, according to the committee. Its findings and recommendations are due in about two months, staff director Steve Jenning said.

Majoy-Young says she didn’t even know what questions to ask Cummings when she hired her. Now, the questions are endless.

“I just wonder what hell I put Kevin through every day,” she said. “You never stop wondering. I try not to feel guilty about it, but the hardest part is not knowing what happened. This is a parent’s worst nightmare.”

While the lawmakers prepare their report, the Cummings case is headed back to court for another round. Jury selection for a second trial begins Wednesday. Cummings is accused of second-degree murder in the death of Kevin Young, who is remembered by his mother as “a very happy baby and very easy to like.”

At Cummings’ first trial, the jury deadlocked 7 to 5 in favor of acquittal after eight days of contentious deliberations. A month later, a judge dismissed manslaughter charges in another baby’s death, saying there was insufficient evidence that Cummings’ actions caused the baby to die.

Cummings continues to profess her innocence, maintaining she is a victim of coincidence, and the target of a prosecutor’s vendetta.

“You would think they found 12 or 13 children’s corpses under my house, the way (Deputy Dist. Atty.) Carol Fisch is going after me,” Cummings said.

“I think she’s dangerous,” Fisch said.

Cummings, on the other hand, describes herself as a loving mother dedicated to bringing up her daughter. She said she baby-sat to make extra money, and to have other children around to play with her daughter.

She said the case has taken a huge financial and emotional toll, shattering the pleasant suburban life she’d enjoyed as a Reseda housewife, doting on her husband, running errands in her minivan and working tirelessly as president of the PTA at Shirley Avenue Elementary School.

Cummings, who retains custody of her daughter, has since divorced, moved several times, and is driving a 12-year-old Honda. She is bitter, and quick to complain about police investigators and an “incomplete” coroner’s report used to bring charges against her.

“The American way of living has become very colored, very disillusioned,” she said.

During her trial, friends recanted their previously glowing statements about Cummings, and her own son testified that he had seen his mother mistreat other children. The son also said Cummings made racist remarks about young Kevin and his family.

The son, Joshua Rickards, then 18, said he’d seen his mother spank a child in 1989 for sucking her thumb and put another in a closet, saying it was easier to sleep in the dark. She once left Kevin unattended for an hour, strapped into a car seat on her bed, Rickards testified.

He testified that she referred to Kevin as “an Oreo baby from an Oreo family,” because one of the child’s parents is black, and the other white, like Cummings.

The first signs of trouble came three months before Kevin’s death, on March 15, 1990, when Matthew Cooley, 14 months old, died during a park outing with Cummings. According to testimony, Cummings left the child unattended on a blanket, and he suffered a seizure. No autopsy was performed.

“I truly believe that if the police would have investigated Matthew’s death thoroughly, my son would be alive today,” said Majoy-Young.

Prosecutors admit they don’t know exactly what happened the afternoon Kevin received his fatal injuries, partially because the only people present were Cummings and her 2-year-old nephew.

Cummings says she stepped into the kitchen momentarily to fix a bottle and returned after hearing a “noise like a thump” in her living room. “If I had done something, don’t you think I’d come up with a better story than I was out of the room?”

If guilty, Cummings pointed out, she could have plea-bargained. “I could have been out already with good behavior,” she said.

Looking back, Majoy-Young wonders if she should have been concerned earlier. Kevin had begun to cry when she dropped him off, but she attributed it to normal separation anxiety. On one occasion, Kevin’s nose was red and swollen when she picked him up and Cummings explained that he had “slipped” on the kitchen floor while chasing a cat.

When Matthew Cooley died, Majoy-Young told the subcommittee, Cummings told her his mother was a drug addict and that “those kinds of babies have seizures.” Later, after her own son died and the police investigation began, she learned Cummings’ story about Cooley was untrue.

Majoy-Young and Cummings give differing accounts of the day Kevin fell into his coma.

Cummings asserts the Youngs brought the child to the house unexpectedly that day and has insinuated that he may have been injured before she took charge of him. He’d been sick, but she said she agreed to watch him.

She insisted that Kevin hit his head on a coffee table, but the Los Angeles County coroner and other medical experts say the skull fractures he suffered could result only from a blow or a fall from a three-story building.

Hearing the noise in the living room, Cummings said she rushed in and found Kevin looking “like a cartoon figure, kind of wobbly, like he was seeing stars.”

Kevin was conscious, Cummings said, and she immediately called Majoy-Young at work.

Majoy-Young asserts, however, that while Kevin was indeed vomiting that day, doctors said it was because he was teething. She said he wasn’t sick, and that no head bumps or other injuries had been detected during a routine pediatrician’s exam he received at 9 months.

She told the subcommittee she arrived about 15 minutes after Cummings called her at work and found the sitter holding Kevin on her shoulder and patting his backside. Cummings told her the baby was sleeping and she couldn’t wake him, Majoy-Young said.

“His breathing was sporadic and he was very pale,” Majoy-Young said. “I asked Debbie if I should call 911, but she told me that it would be faster if I took him myself.”

At the hospital, doctors and a social worker told Majoy-Young the baby had a fractured skull, and that he couldn’t have received such a severe injury by falling against a coffee table.

Kevin died the next day when efforts to control the swelling in his brain failed and life support was disconnected.

“We’re not talking about a bump on the head,” prosecutor Fisch recently said, describing two large skull fractures and bruising on Kevin’s intestine that doctors said happened at the same time as the head injuries.

Cummings defends herself by pointing to a section of a coroner’s report. Cummings interprets the report as showing the child had prior injuries. Investigators found a “chocolate-colored blood clot,” which she interpreted as “an old injury.”

Additionally, experts hired by the coroner’s office found “fibroblasts,” a medical term that usually indicates healing is under way.

“The fibroblasts are consistent with an older injury,” Deputy Public Defender Tamar Rachel Toister said. “They are not consistent with an injury that occurred within 24 hours of death.”

While Cummings believes the findings vindicate her, Fisch said several doctors who testified at the first trial disagreed, saying fibroblasts occur naturally as children grow.

Toister said she believes an earlier injury was exacerbated by a “freak accident” that caused the second, fatal blow to Kevin’s head. “I think the evidence supports two blows,” Toister said.

At the first trial, a neuropathology report, which is part of the coroner’s investigation and contains the key phrase about the blood clot, was not submitted to the defense until two weeks before the trial started, Cummings said.

While it is not uncommon for paperwork and reports to appear on the eve of criminal trials, Cummings said the report contains the crucial information which shows Kevin had a pre-existing condition. Properly investigated by experts hired by her defense, the information could have exonerated her, Cummings contended.

“I was arrested on the basis of an autopsy report,” she said, “and it wasn’t complete.”

Spreading out dozens of documents and transcripts related to her case, Cummings quietly said, “This is my life.”

After spending thousands gathered from relatives and at fund-raisers staged by friends to pay for a private attorney, Cummings said she is close to broke.

Because she was the only adult present when the child was injured, Cummings was not surprised when police wanted to question her. But detectives never checked the coffee table for hairs or fibers and there were no other visible injuries on Kevin’s body, she maintained.

Free on bail, Cummings has moved eight times since the first trial because she fears retribution. She says she is ready for a second trial.

“I am guilty of one thing,” she said. “I baby-sat without a license.”

The Youngs have another child, Kasey, who is now 2, and have moved to Maryland, convinced that California is no place to raise a family. Both parents work, and child care is still a concern.

“Every day I live in fear wondering if I’m going to get a phone call and hear someone telling me that something has happened to my son,” Majoy-Young told the subcommittee. “I wonder if he is being cared for properly, if he’s being loved or if he’s being neglected. I will never have the peace of mind knowing that my son is 100% safe.”