Death of child described at trial
WEST CHESTER >> Jurors hearing the case of a West Goshen woman accused of the “shaken baby” murder of 20-month-old Ethan Zhang listened intently as a prosecutor described how the child appeared when he was brought to the emergency room at the Chester County Hospital the day he died.
“He was unresponsive,” Deputy District Attorney Megan King said Monday in her opening statement to the panel of six men and six women in Judge Ann Marie Wheatcraft’s courtroom. “He was freezing cold to the touch.” There were visible bruises on his neck and arm, and a significant bruise across his forehead that extended under the hair on the front of his head.”
The nurse who gathered in the child in from the arms of Hainan “Chelsea” Chang, who had brought him to the hospital in the mid-morning of Jan. 8, 2015, King said, “knew immediately that there was something terribly wrong with Ethan. She and a doctor on duty tried everything they could do to revive him, but it was useless. “He was dead,” King told the panel.
In her description of the circumstances of Ethan’s death, King said that he had suffered massive brain bleeding that authorities determined had been caused by “shaking and slamming” that had occurred a day or so before Chang brought him to the hospital. It was not, King said, the kind of injury that would be caused by the “boo boo” bump on the head that Chang told West Goshen detectives he had suffered when they began looking into the circumstances of his death.
“Time and again, she went to the theory that this was an accident,” King, a prosecutor with the DA’s Child Abuse Unit, said of Chang’s multiple statements during the investigation, during which she told police that Ethan had hurt himself while playing underneath a dining room table the day before she brought him to the hospital, and subsequently became less and less active until she found him cold and unconscious the next morning. “But it was no accident.”
“Any reasonable person would have been able to tell that something was terribly, terribly wrong with Ethan,” she said.
But although defense attorney Evan Kelly, representing the 44-year-old Chang, agreed with King about the physical details of how Ethan died, he disagreed with her accusation that his client was in any way responsible for his death.
“This case is a tragedy, we agree,” said Kelly in his opening statement, as Chang sat at the defense table and quietly wept. “But it is also a tragedy that Mrs. Chang sits here accused because of the government’s speculation suspicion, and guess work.
“There is no evidence linking her to this horrible crime,” Kelly said.
He said the multiple versions of what happened in the day prior to his death came because she was attempting to deflect attention from whoever was actually responsible for the physical assaults that Ethan had been subject to.
“She lied to police,” Kelly acknowledged. “But was she lying to police because she killed this child, or was she lying to police because someone else did it and she was covering up for them?”
In the end, the jury will have to determine whether there is enough evidence to convict Chang of third-degree murder and endangering the welfare of children. The trial is expected to last the entire week in Wheatcraft’s courtroom.
Chang is a native of China, and moved to the United States on her own in 2002 when she was 28. She worked in Chinese restaurants in Allentown until she met her husband, Sui Fung Lee, a man who had come to the country in 1980 and had a number of family members here. The couple moved to West Goshen in 2011 and raised two children, a son and a daughter — both of whom are expected to testify during the trial.
Chang’s best friend, Wei Feng “Mandy” Dong, a Chester County woman who owns a restaurant here, was the person who brought Ethan’s family and Chang together. The families, who live in Florida, were considering sending their newborn to China to be raised when Wei put them in touch with Chang in March 2014. The family paid her $2,000 a month to care for the boy.
In testimony Monday, Fei said that she had suggested Chang as a caretaker because they held similar spiritual beliefs — both are practicing Buddhists — and Chang’s home was clans and tidy. The fact that Chang had raised two children of her own at the time also made her a suitable person to care for the child, she said.
In her opening, King said that Chang had given police the following account of the hours before Ethan’s death:
On Jan. 7, 2015, Ethan awoke and was fed breakfast as Chang’s children got ready for school. She drove the two to the bus stop, then came home and began working around the house. Ethan was in a high chair.
Chang said that around lunchtime that day, she heard Ethan crying and found that he had hit his head while underneath a dining room table. When she tried to feed him, he threw the food up, she said. He seemed sleepy, and she put Ethan to bed when her husband, Lee, came home from working s late shift in Philadelphia.
Chang put the child to bed, first with her, and then on his mattress in the couple’s bedroom. The following morning, Jan. 8, 2015, she tried to wake him but he had his eyes closed, and had skin that was cold to the touch. Ethan would not take food when she tried to feed him, and by midmorning, she said she decided he needed attention. She called Wei, who told her to take the child to the hospital. But instead of calling an ambulance,
Chang drove the child to the hospital on East Marshall Street.
Jennifer Walsh, the supervising nurse in the Chester County Hospital Emergency room that morning, said she was on duty when Chang arrived with the boy. “He won’t wake up,” Walsh quoted Chang as saying. The nurse called for help, and took Ethan’s body from Chang.
“He was exceptionally pale, lifeless, sort of a little rag doll lying in her arms,” Walsh said. “When I took him from her, he was very, very cold.” How cold, King asked?
Walsh said she had treated victims of hypothermia and cold water drowning before. “But I’ve never taken a child out of someone’s arms that that that cold, that lifeless.”