Image of frightened young mom wrenching
Picture from taxi ride to hospital shown at trial over infant’s death
— There are four pictures from the incar camera of a taxi that are now exhibits at the seconddegree murder trial of Ronny Munoz-Hernandez. The pictures were taken on Sunday, Sept. 12, 2010.
Munoz-Hernandez, who is now 25, appears in one of them. He is in the back seat of the cab, on the passenger’s side, looking out the window.
In the other three are his former girlfriend, Jessica DaSilva, who turns 23 on Thursday, and her baby boy, Adriel Garcia, who is mostly swaddled in a white blanket.
In one shot, DaSilva’s face looks bleary and swollen. She is holding onto the baby’s hand. In another, she is wiping her cheek.
DaSilva is now in the witness stand, and on Wednesday she was asked by prosecutor Laura Bird what she was doing in the picture. “Crying,” she said, and she was crying as she said it.
It is the other picture that is truly heartbreaking.
In this one, DaSilva is snuggling with the baby in the blanket; the lower part of her face is buried in blanket and baby.
That’s not the wrenching bit.
That part is the top of baby Adriel’s head visible in the shot.
It appears to be covered in peach fuzz, the way babies’ heads often are at the age of five-and-a-half months; he is not bald but he is baldish. His head appears to be bent a bit forward and there is just a hint of a glimpse of the back of his neck, the real sweet spot of a baby.
Adriel is so unspeakably, nakedly, transparently vulnerable you can almost smell him.
The modern conventions of the Canadian court system notwithstanding, which have DaSilva accompanied to court by a professional soother from the victim/ witness office, Adriel is the victim in this awful story.
When those pictures were taken, he was already dying, though through the extraordinary efforts of doctors at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children, who performed emergency brain surgery, and the miracles of life support, he lingered for some weeks, finally succumbing on Nov. 9. But he never woke up again.
After that morning, when DaSilva said she found him in his playpen — covered in bruises, breathing heavily, eyes shut, limbs limp — he never responded again. He never opened his eyes.
At last the doctors told her “there was no hope, no recovery,” then took him off the breathing machine, removed the blanket that regulated his temperature, and finally took away the feeding tube. Only then, his mother said, “when they took away the milk, Adriel had passed away.”
During those last nine weeks of the baby’s life, DaSilva slept at the hospital every night, she said, in the waiting room.
At first, all she could do was sit beside him, but later, she was able to hold him. She would put him in his stroller, she said, “and talk with him” and walk around the hospital so he could “hear different voices.”
It is a wrenching, romantic picture — the grieving young mom by her baby’s side — but things were rather more complicated in life.
The baby’s father was a Mexican man who was illegally living in Texas; DaSilva met him online on a site called ratehispanic.com and was soon flying down to meet him. On her second month-long stay, at 18, she got pregnant; on the third, she was quite pregnant.
There was, DaSilva told Paula Rochman, the lawyer for Munoz-Hernandez, no discussion of what would happen when the baby came. “We were gonna talk about it afterwards,” she said.
Adriel was born in March of 2010; by then, DaSilva had met Munoz-Hernandez, though it wasn’t until the baby was about two months old that they became intimate.
DaSilva had by then moved out of her mother’s apartment and was living with her grandmother, but once she and Munoz-Hernandez started up, she began to stay over at the one-bedroom apartment he shared with his brother — and eventually with an aunt and uncle and their two youngsters — and soon enough was spending most nights there.
Baby Adriel was always in tow, of course. He slept in his playpen next to where the young couple slept on the living room floor.
As DaSilva admitted to Rochman, she wanted to be with her boyfriend. “Your priority was to be with Ronny?” “Yes,” she said. While she disagreed with Rochman that she had often left the baby with friends while she went out, it’s clear she was at the least a typical young single mother, juggling her baby’s needs with her own.
Three days before what DaSilva and the lawyers already have come to call “the incident” — this is the day the baby began to die — the trio moved into an apartment of their own.
On the Saturday, Sept. 11, DaSilva was going to a family wedding with a female cousin, an event that saw her leave the baby with Munoz-Hernandez for about 18 hours, though he had only looked after the baby once before, and didn’t regularly change or feed him.
After being away so long, when she returned to the apartment in the wee hours, DaSilva peeked at the baby; it was dark, and he appeared to be sleeping, she said.
Before noon the next day, the three of them were in the cab, heading to Sick Kids. Adriel had suffered a devastating brain injury, and his abdomen and penis were bruised.
She asked what had happened, but Munoz-Hernandez just kept saying he didn’t know and that he was scared. She said he told her to tell the police that a woman named Clara had been looking after Adriel, and, astonishingly, DaSilva did just that in her first interview with Toronto police.
As for why she lied, she said, “I didn’t understand what was happening, I was just confused, I was filled with emotions.”
About eight hours later, she decided “I wanted to tell the truth, for my son,” and gave the police a second statement.
By then, Munoz-Hernandez was in the wind, not to be seen for 10 months. He is pleading not guilty.