By MARIE SZANISZLO
The Boston Herald
Copyright 2006 Boston Herald Inc.
Emergency medical workers arrived at a Hyde Park housing project last year to find a 13-year-old girl lying emaciated and nearly unconscious in a diaper, a “brown, foul-smelling ooze” coming from her pierced navel when it became infected after her mother left her to languish for weeks, prosecutors said yesterday.
“What EMTs saw . . . shocked them,” Assistant District Attorney David Deakin said in his opening argument in the Suffolk Superior Court trial of the mother, 39-year-old Deborah Robinson.
Emergency medical technician Donald Efstathiou testified that he was dispatched shortly before 3 a.m. on Aug. 3, 2005, to 167 Garfield Ave., where he found Robinson’s daughter lying in a diaper and T-shirt, so “malnourished” that her eyes were sunken and her ribs, cheekbones and the tendons in her neck all protruded.
Robinson told the EMT that her daughter had been complaining of abdominal pain “for a few weeks,” Efstathiou said.
Under cross examination, he said the defendant told him the girl had been eating soup that week, and when she stopped, Robinson called 911. Efstathiou also acknowledged that he had described the defendant as “clueless and not realizing how sick her child was.”
“This story is a story of poverty, of ignorance, of a single mother of two children, trying to do the best she could with very limited resources,” defense attorney Janet Macnab said as her client sat quietly in a ponytail, black suit and short, black boots.
Because the swelling around her daughter’s navel had subsided, Robinson thought the girl was getting better, Macnab said. The moment the defendant realized she wasn’t, Robinson ran to the nearest pay phone because she couldn’t afford a phone of her own and called 911.
Robinson is charged with wantonly and recklessly permitting substantial bodily injury to a child under 14, a felony that carries a maximum prison term of five years.