Doctors Testify In Kincaid Case
July 29, 2020 at 12:52 a.m.
By Amanda [email protected]
Kincaid, 31, Columbia City, is charged with aggravated battery, a Level 1 felony; neglect of a dependant resulting in death, a Level 1 felony; and battery resulting in death to a person less than 14 years old, a Level 2 felony, after 11-month-old Emma Grace Leeman, of Pierceton, allegedly died in her care on April 12, 2018.
Whitley County Prosecuting Attorney DJ Sigler is representing the State of Indiana, and Kincaid is represented by Preston Bradley Baber and Zachary Preston Baber, a father-son team from Baber & Baber PC in Columbia City.
The trial – in Whitley County Circuit Court Judge Matthew Rentschler’s courtroom – is being held virtually due to COVID-19 and the small courtroom being unable to socially distance members of the public who wish to spectate, or members of the press. The trial is made available to livestream at https://public.courts.in.gov/incs#/.
The five man, seven woman jury is deciding Kincaid’s guilt, and if convicted of all charges she faces more than 100 years in prison.
Tuesday began with Zach Baber playing a clip of an interview with Nick Leeman, father of Emma Grace, with the Whitley County Sheriff’s Department Det. William Brice.
In the clip, Leeman said of the day of the incident that he picked Emma up a little later than usual and, “she was actually upset I was late. As soon as she saw me, she started crying. ... She actually latched her arms back on Courtney trying not to come to me.”
The state’s next witness was Brice, who said he led the investigation and that during the course of the yearlong investigation, Kincaid told several different stories about what happened.
Next, Baber played a May 29, 2019, interview between Kincaid and Brice and Indiana State Police Det. Andrew Mills. During the interrogation, Kincaid is sobbing the entire time and at the beginning asks what the warrant for her arrest and charges are for. When detectives tell her the charges, she said, “Those charges are wrong. ... I loved her. I took care of her. ... I treated those kids like my own. My kids are everything to me, including Emma, and I couldn’t help her.”
Kincaid said she remembered that day but she doesn’t understand the battery and neglect charges. Kincaid first repeats her story of that she was walking out the back patio door, holding Emma on her hip and the children also running out the back door ran into her, she tripped and Emma fell onto the concrete. Kincaid later said, “I screwed up. I walked out the back door and on the porch at the patio ledge and I put Emma on the ledge to get the other kids out the door, and I was right beside her, and (the dog) ran out, and when (the dog) runs out she always runs over that ledge, and she pushed Emma, and I thought she was OK.”
During this time, detectives are telling Kincaid that her stories do not match up with the medical findings of injuries that Emma suffered. She also asks if she’ll be able to go home, to which they let her know her bond is $200,000 so she’ll have to come up with $20,000.
Kincaid insisted throughout the interview that she is scared – scared because Emma died and she has children.
Mills said the only reason somebody would not be telling the truth is because they’re “hiding something ... or they don’t want to take accountability for what occurred. Why are we still hiding the truth? We’re not here today on a whim.”
Kincaid then said she doesn’t remember exactly what she was feeling that morning, “but knew it had been a pretty rough morning with everybody, the fighting, yelling, the dog running around tripping all over everyone and everything.”
Kincaid then said that she remembered Emma was crying and screaming and the boys she was watching went to a bedroom and Emma would not stop screaming, so she put Emma in her crib and gave her a blanket. Emma still would not stop crying, Kincaid said, so she tried to bounce her.
“Everybody’s crying, everybody but the boys,” Kincaid said. “And Emma wouldn’t stop crying. I didn’t mean to.”
“You didn’t mean to what?,” Mills asked her.
“I put her onto my shoulder and as hard as I could just laid her on the ground. ... She hit her head, and she hit head first, and then I?sat her up and she took her blanket and she kept crying and staring at me.”
Kincaid said Emma eventually went ot sleep. “And I thought I could hear her snoring. ... Then I realized she was gurgling, and then I see I just remember she was asleep and she was just snoring but then I heard knocking, and I knew she wasn’t right, and ... I just remember she was looking at me but there wasn’t anything there, and it was like her eyes were just gray. ... I just called 911. ... I didn’t know that it was going to happen. Even for a second did I ever get mad at any of the kids. They cried, they fight, they’re kids,” she said.
At this point in the filmed interview, Kincaid collapses to the floor in the middle of a panic attack. The detectives leave the room and a nurse has to come in to help Kincaid calm her breathing.
Baber cross-examined Brice and asked him for the dimensions of the interview room that had no windows and carpeted walls.
“I would say probably 6 by 8,” Brice said.
Brice also testified that Kincaid was babysitting about six or five other children all 4 years of age or younger that day.
Next, jurors heard from Dr. William Young, a neurosurgeon employed at Parkview in Fort Wayne. He performed the craniectomy on Emma that day. A craniectomy is a surgery done to remove a part of the skull in order to relieve pressure in that area when the brain swells. It is usually performed after a traumatic brain injury and done to treat conditions that cause the brain to swell or bleed.
That surgery was unsuccessful and Emma died April 13, 2018.
Young testified that the injuries Emma sustained in this case by having massive bleeding and brain swelling and a large skull fracture on the left side of her head “was like getting hit by a baseball bat.”
He also testified that because an infant’s, a child’s skull bones are not fully formed as an adult’s, it takes severe force to cause a skull fracture – more so than it would in an adult.
“The amount of force necessary to produce that fracture would be a big force?” Sigler asked Young. “The defendant says maybe the child fell off a couple of feet.”
“That’s inconsistent,” Young said.
When Baber cross-examined Young, he asked Young if he thinks Young would have had been able to generate enough force by slamming the child just one time.
“I would really have to slam the child very hard,” Young said. He also testified when a juror asked a question if the injury could have been caused through rough horse play, “I don’t think so.”
The state’s next witness was Dr. Jay Patel, who specializes in pediatric intensive care at Parkview in Fort Wayne. He treated Emma that day and ruled it to be non-accidental trauma. Patel said Kincaid’s story is inconsistent with the injuries.
Patel elaborated on shaken baby syndrome and said an infant’s head weighs more than their general body, “so when you hold the baby at the trunk area or the chest and try to shake the baby, the head, whichever side you are shaking, it goes in that opposing direction and inside the skull, the brain goes in the opposite direction, so they are hitting while the child is being shaken, causing injury to the brain by shearing blood vessels inside the brain attached from the surface of the brain and causes hemorrhage, and that hemorrhage ends up accumulating too much, and that’s what we see on an examination of the CAT scan.”
Patel also agreed when Sigler said it is unlikely that Emma was dropped from shoulder or waist height from the 5’3” frame of Kincaid onto the ground, causing this significant of injury. Patel said if infants and children died from injuries when they fell of an adult’s hip, “we’d have graveyards full of babies.”
Patel said Emma was declared brain dead.
Jurors next heard from Indiana University Health pediatrician Dr. Ralph Hicks who said IU Health has a contract with the Department of Child Services and that he works as a consultant through Riley Children’s Hospital as well. He was asked to review the medical records of Emma following the event through contact with a DCS case manager, he said. He believes Emma suffered abusive head trauma.
The last witness of the day was Dr. John Reed, a radiologist at Parkview in Fort Wayne who specializes in interventional radiology. Reed said he was called to read the images that day for Emma and he found a large bleed in the left side of the cranial cavity that was not in the brain but in the tissue surrounding the brain.
“This bleed was not inside, it was outside, but it was pretty sizeable and it was compressing and shifting the brain and cleary there was injury to the underlying brain with swelling,” he said, adding that all of those situations usually lead to “brain death.”
“Everything pointed to a major blow or some sort of blunt force impact to the side of the head,” Reed said. He also agreed it was a large fracture and that he found no evidence of any older injury Emma had prior to the day of April 12, 2018.
Baber said Reed wrote in his report that he believes based on the blood imaging that Emma’s injury occurred mostly likely four to eight hours prior to Reed’s review fo the CT scan, which happened at 1:20 p.m. that day.
More witness testimony is expected to begin at 8:30 a.m. today.
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Kincaid, 31, Columbia City, is charged with aggravated battery, a Level 1 felony; neglect of a dependant resulting in death, a Level 1 felony; and battery resulting in death to a person less than 14 years old, a Level 2 felony, after 11-month-old Emma Grace Leeman, of Pierceton, allegedly died in her care on April 12, 2018.
Whitley County Prosecuting Attorney DJ Sigler is representing the State of Indiana, and Kincaid is represented by Preston Bradley Baber and Zachary Preston Baber, a father-son team from Baber & Baber PC in Columbia City.
The trial – in Whitley County Circuit Court Judge Matthew Rentschler’s courtroom – is being held virtually due to COVID-19 and the small courtroom being unable to socially distance members of the public who wish to spectate, or members of the press. The trial is made available to livestream at https://public.courts.in.gov/incs#/.
The five man, seven woman jury is deciding Kincaid’s guilt, and if convicted of all charges she faces more than 100 years in prison.
Tuesday began with Zach Baber playing a clip of an interview with Nick Leeman, father of Emma Grace, with the Whitley County Sheriff’s Department Det. William Brice.
In the clip, Leeman said of the day of the incident that he picked Emma up a little later than usual and, “she was actually upset I was late. As soon as she saw me, she started crying. ... She actually latched her arms back on Courtney trying not to come to me.”
The state’s next witness was Brice, who said he led the investigation and that during the course of the yearlong investigation, Kincaid told several different stories about what happened.
Next, Baber played a May 29, 2019, interview between Kincaid and Brice and Indiana State Police Det. Andrew Mills. During the interrogation, Kincaid is sobbing the entire time and at the beginning asks what the warrant for her arrest and charges are for. When detectives tell her the charges, she said, “Those charges are wrong. ... I loved her. I took care of her. ... I treated those kids like my own. My kids are everything to me, including Emma, and I couldn’t help her.”
Kincaid said she remembered that day but she doesn’t understand the battery and neglect charges. Kincaid first repeats her story of that she was walking out the back patio door, holding Emma on her hip and the children also running out the back door ran into her, she tripped and Emma fell onto the concrete. Kincaid later said, “I screwed up. I walked out the back door and on the porch at the patio ledge and I put Emma on the ledge to get the other kids out the door, and I was right beside her, and (the dog) ran out, and when (the dog) runs out she always runs over that ledge, and she pushed Emma, and I thought she was OK.”
During this time, detectives are telling Kincaid that her stories do not match up with the medical findings of injuries that Emma suffered. She also asks if she’ll be able to go home, to which they let her know her bond is $200,000 so she’ll have to come up with $20,000.
Kincaid insisted throughout the interview that she is scared – scared because Emma died and she has children.
Mills said the only reason somebody would not be telling the truth is because they’re “hiding something ... or they don’t want to take accountability for what occurred. Why are we still hiding the truth? We’re not here today on a whim.”
Kincaid then said she doesn’t remember exactly what she was feeling that morning, “but knew it had been a pretty rough morning with everybody, the fighting, yelling, the dog running around tripping all over everyone and everything.”
Kincaid then said that she remembered Emma was crying and screaming and the boys she was watching went to a bedroom and Emma would not stop screaming, so she put Emma in her crib and gave her a blanket. Emma still would not stop crying, Kincaid said, so she tried to bounce her.
“Everybody’s crying, everybody but the boys,” Kincaid said. “And Emma wouldn’t stop crying. I didn’t mean to.”
“You didn’t mean to what?,” Mills asked her.
“I put her onto my shoulder and as hard as I could just laid her on the ground. ... She hit her head, and she hit head first, and then I?sat her up and she took her blanket and she kept crying and staring at me.”
Kincaid said Emma eventually went ot sleep. “And I thought I could hear her snoring. ... Then I realized she was gurgling, and then I see I just remember she was asleep and she was just snoring but then I heard knocking, and I knew she wasn’t right, and ... I just remember she was looking at me but there wasn’t anything there, and it was like her eyes were just gray. ... I just called 911. ... I didn’t know that it was going to happen. Even for a second did I ever get mad at any of the kids. They cried, they fight, they’re kids,” she said.
At this point in the filmed interview, Kincaid collapses to the floor in the middle of a panic attack. The detectives leave the room and a nurse has to come in to help Kincaid calm her breathing.
Baber cross-examined Brice and asked him for the dimensions of the interview room that had no windows and carpeted walls.
“I would say probably 6 by 8,” Brice said.
Brice also testified that Kincaid was babysitting about six or five other children all 4 years of age or younger that day.
Next, jurors heard from Dr. William Young, a neurosurgeon employed at Parkview in Fort Wayne. He performed the craniectomy on Emma that day. A craniectomy is a surgery done to remove a part of the skull in order to relieve pressure in that area when the brain swells. It is usually performed after a traumatic brain injury and done to treat conditions that cause the brain to swell or bleed.
That surgery was unsuccessful and Emma died April 13, 2018.
Young testified that the injuries Emma sustained in this case by having massive bleeding and brain swelling and a large skull fracture on the left side of her head “was like getting hit by a baseball bat.”
He also testified that because an infant’s, a child’s skull bones are not fully formed as an adult’s, it takes severe force to cause a skull fracture – more so than it would in an adult.
“The amount of force necessary to produce that fracture would be a big force?” Sigler asked Young. “The defendant says maybe the child fell off a couple of feet.”
“That’s inconsistent,” Young said.
When Baber cross-examined Young, he asked Young if he thinks Young would have had been able to generate enough force by slamming the child just one time.
“I would really have to slam the child very hard,” Young said. He also testified when a juror asked a question if the injury could have been caused through rough horse play, “I don’t think so.”
The state’s next witness was Dr. Jay Patel, who specializes in pediatric intensive care at Parkview in Fort Wayne. He treated Emma that day and ruled it to be non-accidental trauma. Patel said Kincaid’s story is inconsistent with the injuries.
Patel elaborated on shaken baby syndrome and said an infant’s head weighs more than their general body, “so when you hold the baby at the trunk area or the chest and try to shake the baby, the head, whichever side you are shaking, it goes in that opposing direction and inside the skull, the brain goes in the opposite direction, so they are hitting while the child is being shaken, causing injury to the brain by shearing blood vessels inside the brain attached from the surface of the brain and causes hemorrhage, and that hemorrhage ends up accumulating too much, and that’s what we see on an examination of the CAT scan.”
Patel also agreed when Sigler said it is unlikely that Emma was dropped from shoulder or waist height from the 5’3” frame of Kincaid onto the ground, causing this significant of injury. Patel said if infants and children died from injuries when they fell of an adult’s hip, “we’d have graveyards full of babies.”
Patel said Emma was declared brain dead.
Jurors next heard from Indiana University Health pediatrician Dr. Ralph Hicks who said IU Health has a contract with the Department of Child Services and that he works as a consultant through Riley Children’s Hospital as well. He was asked to review the medical records of Emma following the event through contact with a DCS case manager, he said. He believes Emma suffered abusive head trauma.
The last witness of the day was Dr. John Reed, a radiologist at Parkview in Fort Wayne who specializes in interventional radiology. Reed said he was called to read the images that day for Emma and he found a large bleed in the left side of the cranial cavity that was not in the brain but in the tissue surrounding the brain.
“This bleed was not inside, it was outside, but it was pretty sizeable and it was compressing and shifting the brain and cleary there was injury to the underlying brain with swelling,” he said, adding that all of those situations usually lead to “brain death.”
“Everything pointed to a major blow or some sort of blunt force impact to the side of the head,” Reed said. He also agreed it was a large fracture and that he found no evidence of any older injury Emma had prior to the day of April 12, 2018.
Baber said Reed wrote in his report that he believes based on the blood imaging that Emma’s injury occurred mostly likely four to eight hours prior to Reed’s review fo the CT scan, which happened at 1:20 p.m. that day.
More witness testimony is expected to begin at 8:30 a.m. today.
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