No contest pleaded in tot’s ’07 slaying

A 31-year-old Jacksonville man’s tearful no- contest plea Friday to first- degree murder for the November 2007 slaying of a Little Rock toddler, his girlfriend’s son, ended five years of legal wrangling that included appeals to both the Arkansas and U.S. supreme courts.

Alex Martin Blueford, appearing with his attorneys, Sharon Kiel and Bill James, hung his head and choked up before Pulaski County Circuit Judge Barry Sims.

In exchange for his plea, in which he dropped his legal challenge to the charge, reduced from capital murder, prosecutors recommended a 10- year prison sentence for the death of 20-month-old Matthew McFadden Jr. Blueford could be eligible for parole in about two years.

Blueford turned and emotionally addressed the boy’s mother, Kimberly Tolbert, and paternal grandparents, Matthew and Linda McFadden, in what his attorney said was an apology. In the rambling and partially unintelligible speech, Blueford also said that he had grown tired of fighting the case and that they should not believe what they read in the newspaper about him.

Sims let Blueford speak for a few minutes before cutting him off, saying that he couldn’t understand what Blueford was saying. Sims offered the defendant an opportunity to address the family members more privately at the court rail, if they chose to listen. It wasn’t clear whether the family members took him up on that offer, but they quickly left the courtroom.

The boy, whom Blueford was babysitting, was killed by a blow from the defendant that inflicted brain damage, deputy prosecutor Will Jones told the judge.

Blueford has been jailed for almost five years and had been scheduled to stand trial in three weeks.

He stood trial in August 2009, with his attorneys arguing that Blueford had accidentally struck the boy and his injuries had been compounded by medical mistakes during treatment. The proceedings ended with jurors deadlocked, apparently favoring a manslaughter verdict but without the required unanimous decision.

That outcome sparked an almost three-year- long appeals process centering on whether constitutional prohibitions against double jeopardy allowed Blueford to be tried again for capital murder or only for manslaughter. Both the Arkansas Supreme Court, ruling in January 2011, and the U.S. Supreme Court in May 2012, said that he could face the capital-murder charge again.

Blueford, in testimony and interviews with police, gave different accounts of how the toddler came to be injured.

He initially claimed he didn’t know how the boy was hurt. In a 10-minute interview with Little Rock detectives in November 2007, two days before the toddler died, Blueford said the boy had been jumping on the bed and playing with a hat before lying down and pulling a blanket over himself. He said he had checked on the boy a few times before he realized that the toddler wasn’t breathing correctly.

He continued to deny wrongdoing in a second interview, about two weeks after Matthew’s death, but he said he understood why detectives were investigating him.

“I know this looks bad for me because I was there,” he said in the 29-minute recording with Little Rock detectives. “Let me clarify this again: A child abuser, I am not. A murderer, I am not.”

The third time he spoke with investigators — in Texas, where he’d gone after learning police were going to arrest him for capital murder — Blueford blamed the toddler’s mother, saying the 26-year-old woman had pushed Matthew into a chair.

He said he didn’t tell Arkansas investigators because he didn’t want to get the woman into trouble. Blueford said that he’d never seen her get angry with the boy before, but that she lost her temper after having a phone argument with the toddler’s father.

“She pushed him hard. And he hit that chair hard … like boom! She pushed too hard,” Blueford, crying, told a detective in Tyler, Texas. “He’s just laying there [moaning]. Every night I go to sleep, dude, … and see his … eyes.”

Three weeks later, Blueford again spoke with Little Rock authorities, telling police what he would later say at his trial, that he had accidentally elbowed the boy in the head, knocking him when the toddler nearly burned him with a cigarette Blueford had just put down.

“I felt the burn of the cigarette … and I jumped,” Blueford said, crying. “I jumped, man, and I hit him, and I didn’t think. He fell back on the bed, man, and he just had a look on his face like he was hurt.”

Blueford spent about an hour on the stand at his trial. He admitted lying to police before his guilty conscience prompted him to tell police he’d accidentally hit the boy.

He said he put the boy in bed but didn’t realize for some time that the child was hurt badly. He said he didn’t initially tell police he’d struck the child because he feared what convicts would do to him if he was sent to prison for killing a child.

At trial, prosecutors said Blueford’s lies hampered doctors’ efforts to treat the boy. They also said his version of events couldn’t account for the severity of the boy’s injuries, which authorities compared with those from a car crash or a fall from a building.