Mom vows to tell her side of infant’s death in shelter
A woman facing criminal charges in connection with the death of her 4-month-old son said she’s looking forward to telling her side of the story after taking issue with a blistering litany of accusations levied by a prosecutor who said she was only using her son to stay in a Lynn shelter.
“This child is a casualty of the defendant’s apathy and complete lack of interest in her child or being with her child,” Essex prosecutor Kim Faitella said during a lobby conference yesterday in Essex Superior Court. “She didn’t follow through, she didn’t take advantage of any of the services offered to her.”
Laci Kirk, 23, is charged with wanton or reckless endangerment of a child after prosecutors say her infant son, Charles Brand III, was found unresponsive and bleeding from his nose in a cluttered crib inside a family shelter in Lynn in September 2015. Kirk has been held on $15,000 bail since being indicted last year.
Although the medical examiner ruled the baby died of natural causes, prosecutors say Kirk left the child alone for hours while she smoked, drank, and surfed the web. Kirk vocally and demonstratively objected as Faitella stated her case, prompting Judge Thomas Drechsler to order her removed from the courtroom.
Kirk’s attorney, Mike Phelan, said his client wanted to call off the conference and proceed to trial.
“She is pretty adamant she wants a trial,” Phelan said, “She wants to be able to tell her side of the story.”
Faitella recounted an interview with the Department of Children and Families about a month before Charles’ death in which she said Kirk claimed she needed the baby with her so she could stay in the shelter and called him “boring.”
The child’s aunt, Samantha Brand, said “there is a hole in my family that can’t be filled.”