Canoga Park Man Arrested in Death of Infant Daughter

After months of investigation, Los Angeles police on Friday arrested a Canoga Park man with a history of domestic violence on suspicion of murdering his infant daughter last spring.

The 4-month-old girl, Kryistal Marie Don, was pronounced dead on St. Patrick’s Day after her 11-year-old baby-sitter found her unresponsive and called paramedics, according to the baby’s mother.

A coroner’s report concluded that the death, initially believed by hospital workers to be a case of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, was actually caused by cerebral trauma.

On Friday, two detectives from a Los Angeles Police Department child-abuse unit went to the family’s Sherman Way apartment and arrested 25-year-old John Don on suspicion of murder. Don, a security guard, was taken to Van Nuys Jail, where he was being held in lieu of $1-million bail. He is scheduled for arraignment Tuesday.

The arrest culminated months of lengthy and repeated interviews with Don, his 24-year-old wife, Jackie Ramsey, and the unidentified baby-sitter, all of whom had access to Kryistal before her death, according to Ramsey and a minister for the family, Tony Jackson of the Woodland Hills Neighborhood Church.

Both parents and the sitter submitted teeth imprints to be compared with an alleged bite mark on the baby’s buttocks, and the parents also took lie detector tests, Ramsey and Jackson said.

Jackson, an assistant pastor at the evangelical Neighborhood Church, said the impoverished couple--who have two other children, ages 3 and nearly 5--were targeted for intense scrutiny by detectives because of Don’s two misdemeanor convictions for spousal abuse.

Jackson said he believes that if the couple could have afforded an attorney, police would have left them to their grief long ago. The minister added he also believed that Don, whom he described as a born-again Christian and a recovering alcoholic, had abandoned his violent behavior.

“I believe he’s reformed in a sense that he is no longer acting out the kinds of behavior that he exhibited before he committed his life to Christ,” Jackson said.

Jackson also said he believed that police had arrested Don not because they had hard evidence he killed his daughter, but in the hopes of extracting a confession.

“I think they’re strong-arming him,” said Jackson, who has helped Don hire defense lawyer Dean Masserman of Beverly Hills.

Detectives on the case could not be reached Friday to comment on Jackson’s charges. But another knowledgeable source who asked not to be identified said it had been an especially tough case to crack.

Not only was the baby with its parents and the sitter the day she died, but there were also signs of prior abuse, including the alleged bite mark on her buttocks and bruises on her scalp, the source said.

Complicating the investigation was that Ramsey failed a lie detector test while Don, the prime suspect, passed, the source said. The mark on the child’s buttocks also did not match the father’s teeth but seemed closer in size to the mother’s or baby-sitter’s, the source said, adding that the father was nonetheless the key suspect because of his history of violence.

“This is a poor little kid who didn’t have a good life, and I think the LAPD feels very badly about it. . . . It’s been very frustrating to them,” the source said.

It has also been frustrating for the parents, according to Jackson, who described repeated interrogations, threats of arrest and attempts to bully the husband and wife into turning each other in.

Ramsey blamed the “crescent-shaped bruise” on her daughter’s buttocks on a paramedic’s efforts to revive her. She said police harassed her in recent months by phoning and saying her husband had been arrested when he had not.

Ramsey also said that even though her husband has been jailed twice for beating her--the most recent incident when she was pregnant with Kryistal--she believes he is innocent of murder.

“He didn’t do it. . . . I know he didn’t,” Ramsey said. “He wouldn’t let anybody near his daughter with a 10-foot pole. He loved her too much.”