Scalded toddler ‘screamed and screamed’

• A toddler who had been scalded by hot coffee screamed when he was given a bath, the boy’s great aunt testified in a London, Ont., court on Friday.

Dorothy Ford, who lives in Newfoundland, was visiting with her sister, Bessie Lagerwerf, and her husband on the Victoria Day weekend in 2014 when the Lagerwerfs’ granddaughter, Amanda Dumont, arrived with boyfriend Scott Bakker and three of her four children.

Ryker Daponte- Michaud, 20 months old, promptly threw up in the hallway. His mother scooped him up to give him a bath.

“I heard the little man scream, scream, scream,” Ford testified Friday at the Superior Court jury trial of Dumont, 30, and Bakker, 27, who have pleaded not guilty to criminal negligence causing death and failing to provide the necessaries of life to Ryker.

Ryker, who was badly burned by a cup of scalding hot coffee sometime during that long weekend, died May 21, 2014, three days after the impromptu visit to Lager- werfs’. He suffered second and third-degree burns from his waist almost to his knees, covering his genitalia, buttocks, thighs and part of his back.

Fo r d was testifying through closed- circuit link from the St. John’s courthouse. She said she was visiting that spring after spending Christmas in Georgia with her daughter.

Lagerwerf, who had been a nurse, agreed that her re- lationship with Dumont was close, but Dumont changed at Christmas 2013 shortly after she started dating Bakker, who Lagerwerf agreed was demanding and controlling.

She said the night the family came to her house Dumont told her grandmother t hat “Scott was changing the baby and there was a hot cup of coffee there and it spilled.” Dumont wasn’t there.