The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
CASE GOES TO JURY
Defense attorney tells jurors that witness testimony is not credible
MIDDLETOWN >> The jury deciding the fate of Tony Moreno asked Tuesday to rehear key testimony about his last moments on the Arrigoni Bridge.
Deliberations began at about 1:45 p.m. after both sides presented their closing arguments in Middlesex Superior Court in the trial of Moreno, who is accused of dropping his infant son off the Arrigoni Bridge on July 5, 2015, causing 7-month-old Aaden Moreno to fall 100 feet to his death in the Connecticut River.
After three hours of deliberation the forewoman sent a note to Judge Elpedio N. Vitale, asking to hear the portion of Middletown police Officer Aus-
“Tony was responsible for Aaden’s safety. Tony failed. Tony told you that, but is this a case of murder or is it something every bit as tragic but far less evil?” — defense attorney Norm Pattis
tin Smith’s testimony that states what time he arrived at the bridge that fateful evening.
The state’s case hinges on a moment-to-moment time line of phone calls from Moreno to his mother and texts between himself and the boy’s mother, Adrianne Oyola, 20.
Moreno, 23, could face up to 70 years in prison if convicted on charges of murder and risk of injury to a minor.
“No one ever asked Tony the following very simple question: What happened on the bridge, Tony?” his defense attorney Norm Pattis read from a PowerPoint he showed the jury during his closing.
“Tony was responsible for Aaden’s safety. Tony failed. Tony told you that, but is this a case of murder or is it something every bit as tragic but far less evil?” Pattis asked.
Smith, who was the first on the bridge, testified that he saw Moreno look at him, “put both his hands on the railing and hurl himself over” into the river just after he arrived. “He went right down,” the officer said.
Jury members also asked for testimony from Thursday, which was Tony Moreno’s second day on the stand.
Court had concluded the day prior following testimony about Aaden’s final moments.
“Did something happen with Aaden when you were talking about Justin Bieber and the movie and pointed with your right hand?” Pattis asked him Thursday. “Did you lose control of Aaden at some point?”
On the stand that day, Moreno quietly told Pattis, “I dropped him.”
Pattis claims the boy slipped from his client’s arms as he rested high above the river on the pedestrian walkway railing, pointing out important moments in his love affair with Oyola.
Both sides delivered closing arguments to a packed courtroom Tuesday that included Oyola and the defendant’s mother, Denise Moreno, and many of the police officers who had testified or helped build the case.
Moreno sat at the defense table, his leg moving up and down rapidly — as he has for much of the trial — looking down or straight ahead, not at the jury, and not at the attorneys.
Pattis urged the jury to discount the testimony of Kimberly Parady, a respiratory therapist who was driving home to East Hampton around 11:41 p.m. on July 5 and who said she saw Moreno holding Aaden at the railing at shoulder height.
Pattis systematically went through her claim. “I’m a health-care worker and I see a man walking on the bridge holding a baby. I know it. But I don’t look in my rearview mirror for what the heck is going on,” he said, adding that she went home, went to bed, and didn’t call police until the next day when she heard about the missing baby.
“Did that really seem credible to you?” Pattis asked.
Referring to the texts which the prosecution said detail when Aaden was allegedly dropped into the water, Pattis asked, “how could he be taunting Adrianne when he’s marching on a death march on the bridge?”
As he spoke, Pattis paced in front of the jury box, holding the doll over his right shoulder, rocking it.
During five days of witness testimony, the prosecution laid out its case that Moreno left his home at 11 p.m. on July 5, 2015, and walked the 2.2 miles with Aaden in a stroller to the bridge with the intention of murder and suicide — to kill his boy and then himself — after his three-year relationship with Oyola ended.
A kayaker found Aaden’s body two days later, miles away in East Haddam, in the water near the Salmon River boat launch.
State’s Attorney Peter McShane contends that Moreno, who has suffered from depression for years, was so upset that his girlfriend had rejected his two marriage proposals, obtained a restraining order for threats Moreno allegedly made to end Aaden’s and her life, and moved out of his home that he threw Aaden into the water, then pulled himself over the 4-foot-high railing and jumped.
Moreno survived and woke up the next day badly bruised, his face swollen and on a breathing tube in the intensive care unit at Hartford Hospital, where Middletown police Detective Dale Semper questioned him, asking Moreno to help police find his son in order to “give him a proper burial.”
Moreno never asked what had happened to his son, according to testimony in the case.
“Tony Moreno was the state’s best witness; my star witness was the defendant,” McShane told the jury during his half-hour closing argument. “You saw his demeanor. Sure, under direct examination, he was crying ... there were long pauses. But under cross-examination, he was a different person. He answered right away.
“At one point, he looked at me and asked ‘Is that the question?’ but then under redirect, he was sobbing,” McShane told the jurors, in an attempt to show what he believes is Moreno being calculating.
“Aaden Moreno at 7 months could sit up by himself. He was being introduced to single foods. He could communicate but not yet use his words and Aaden Moreno liked to be held,” McShane told the jury.
“And on July 15, 2015, there was no more Aaden Moreno.”
McShane then recounted the “vile, cruel, pointed texts to the mother of his child” that the prosecution believes proves Moreno dropped his son into the river because he wanted to punish Oyola — make her feel the pain he felt.
“I submit ladies and gentlemen, this was no accident, the defendant went to the bridge with a plan to kill himself and kill his son,” McShane concluded.
“We make no argument here about causation,” defense attorney Pattis said in his hour-long argument, alternating between an intimate conversation only the jury could hear and other pronouncements that resounded around the room.
“Mr. Moreno’s conduct caused the death of Aaden. We’re not arguing that,” Pattis told the jury in summing up his case. “We can see that.”
However, there’s “no question” Moreno loved his son, Pattis continued. “He may have walked out to the bridge with the intent to kill, but when he stood at the railing, he couldn’t do it,” Pattis said.
The defense noted that other lesser charges the jury could return a verdict with are first- or second-degree manslaughter or negligent homicide instead of murder.
Jurors will continue deliberations this morning.