Former PTA President Cleared in Murder Case : Courts: Baby-sitter Debra Cummings is acquitted in the death of a 9-month-old boy.

A former PTA president from Reseda charged with murdering a 9-month-old boy placed in her care was acquitted Thursday in Van Nuys Superior Court.

In an abrupt climax to a retrial that had focused national attention on the quality and affordability of child care, a jury deliberated seven hours before acquitting Debra Suzanne Cummings, 36, of second-degree murder, voluntary manslaughter and child endangerment.

Cummings earlier had been cleared of manslaughter charges in the death of a 14-month-old boy in her care.

As the verdicts were read, Cummings shook with excitement and cried out: “Oh!” She laid her head down on the table, embraced her attorney and sobbed.

“You can leave,” Judge Michael J. Farrell told her. She bolted from her chair and yelled to family and friends: “We’re going home!”

On her way to the elevator, she amended that, shouting out: “We’re going to Disneyland!” Surrounded by well-wishers, she insisted she was serious: “We may stay there the next three days.”

Then, on the way down in the elevator, Cummings hugged her 10-year-old daughter, Megan, and said quietly: “It’s all gone.”

Gone, after four years and two trials, are the charges. The verdict, however, leaves unresolved the underlying mystery: How did 9-month-old Kevin Young die?

Cummings, president of the PTA at Shirley Avenue Elementary School, had advertised “Loving Child Care in My Home” for $75 per week. She has admitted repeatedly that she ran an unlicensed baby-sitting service.

On June 15, 1990, she was baby-sitting Kevin. The next day, he died from severe head injuries.

Prosecutors contended that Cummings attacked the boy, but she maintained that the child exacerbated a prior injury.

At her first trial, which ended last July, a jury deadlocked after eight contentious days of deliberations 7 to 5 in favor of acquittal.

Prosecutor Carol Fisch pressed for a retrial. Cummings complained that she was a victim of coincidence and the target of a vendetta.

The boy’s mother, Toni Majoy-Young, testified in February before a congressional subcommittee investigating the availability of quality child care.

Meanwhile, a judge dismissed manslaughter charges against Cummings in an unrelated case, saying there was no evidence of foul play in the March, 1990, death of 14-month-old Matthew Cooley. He died after an apparent seizure while she was baby-sitting him in a park.

At the retrial, which began two weeks ago, Farrell barred any mention of Cooley’s death, ruling that it would be too prejudicial.

Majoy-Young told jurors that Kevin was “alive and well” when she dropped him off. That afternoon, after picking him up, she said, “I was screaming at him the entire time I was in the car. I said, ‘Kevin, wake up. It’s mom. Wake up! Wake up!’ And he never did.”

Cummings testified that she never would have hurt the boy.

Her attorney, Deputy Public Defender Tamar Rachel Toister, contended that the injury did not occur at Cummings’ home and that, in some cases, symptoms of head injuries do not occur for hours or even days. Many doctors testified about the causes and effects of head injuries. One said that the injury could have been 36 hours old when Kevin was dropped off at Cummings’ house.