Jury begins deliberating in homicide of Knoxville infant girl

As she concluded her closing argument Tuesday, Deputy District Attorney Jennifer DiGiovanni picked up a baby doll and bashed its head twice against the railing of the jury box.

That, she told the jurors, was what Kenneth Reeves did to 5month-old Kamero “Kami” Newton the night of Dec. 6, 2014, causing the girl’s brain and retinas to bleed and ultimately killing her four days later.

Reeves, 31, of Mount Washington, is on trial on homicide and related charges before Allegheny County Common Pleas Judge David R. Cashman. The jury began deliberating Tuesday afternoon.

Reeves had begun dating Kami’s mother a few months earlier. That night, he had gone to her Knoxville home to visit, and she left him in the third-floor bedroom of the home with Kami while she went downstairs to get snacks. While downstairs, she heard Kami cry in a distressed, unusual way. She raced back to the infant, who went limp in her mother’s arms. Reeves denied having done anything to her.

After police arrived, he gave them a false last name and false statement, Ms. DiGiovanni said.

“Lie, lie, lie, lie, lie, lie,” she told the jury. “The defendant will lie. He’ll lie again and again and again.”

Ms. DiGiovanni said Reeves was mad that night that Kami was even home; she was supposed to have gone with her father.

“He’s frustrated. He’s upset, and he’s angry,” she said. “I suggest he takes that frustration and anger out on Kami.”

She reminded the jury that Reeves previously pleaded guilty to aggravated assault for beating a 4year-old boy whose mother he was dating.

Earlier in the day, world-renowned neuropathologist Bennet Omalu testified for the prosecution about Kami’s cause of death.

Dr. Omalu, a former forensic pathologist with the Allegheny County Coroner’s office who discovered the brain disease now known as CTE and was portrayed in the movie “Concussion,” said that Kami sustained severe traumatic brain injury that could not

have been self-inflicted or accidental. He described bleeding in her brain caused by severe rotation of the brain inside the skull, either from shaking or high impact.

Dr. Omalu, now the chief medical examiner in San Joaquin County, Calif., was only recently retained by the DA’s office to review Kami's records after another neuropathologist, Kenneth Clark, told the prosecution he would be unable to testify.

Dr. Clark, who originally agreed that Kami suffered a massive brain injury, told Ms. DiGiovanni in December that he would not be available to testify at the original trial date in January because he had an interview in Mississippi for a “dream job.”

“To be honest,” he wrote, “the more I review the report, the more I think it could be natural or accidental. I just can’t commit with certainty, and I will testify to that. So you can subpoena me, and that’s fine, but I’m not sure my testimony will help much.”

Dr. Omalu was critical of Dr. Clark, noting that if a physician made a mistake in a report and wanted to retract a finding, it would be necessary to provide a written explanation as an addendum. He also said Dr. Clark did not perform the same type of advanced testing that he did.

Defense attorney Lisa Leake proclaimed her client’s innocence and told the jury in her closing that Dr. Omalu was “saying what he’s being paid to say.”