Witnesses testify in baby-assault case

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June 10, 2009

By ANDREA VanVALKENBURG The Press Republican Wed Jun 10, 2009, 04:04 PM EDT

PLATTSBURGH — Jeff Poupore was delivering beer to a Plattsburgh bar last May when he found himself in the middle of an emergency situation.

As the Altona resident pulled up to Bobby’s Lounge on South Catherine Street, he said, a frantic “lady came and asked to use my phone. She said her ... baby was choking.”

With past emergency-medical training, Poupore ran to the woman’s nearby apartment as she called 911. He said he found “a gentleman pacing back and forth screaming and yelling, ‘I thought he died.’ ... He was in a state of panic. Scared.”

“There was a lot of blood on (the baby’s) face,” Poupore testified this morning during the first day of testimony in Anthony Ciccone’s assault trial before Clinton County Court Judge Patrick McGill.

In a matter of seconds, Poupore testified, Ciccone told him the infant boy, Mason Facteau, had choked on a baby wipe.

“I asked her (the mother) why the baby had a baby wipe, and she said she let him chew on them ’cause he was teething.”

Poupore left the apartment when Plattsburgh City firefighters arrived to evaluate the boy.

Firefighter Mark Lawliss said he checked the boy’s airway and inquired about his injuries, including several facial and head bruises, which, he said, Ciccone indicated “the baby had done with a rattle.”

He said Ciccone pointed to a nearby crumpled wipe covered in blood and said “he had to go way down in his throat” to remove it, an action the defense believes accidentally caused the deep lip injury.

The pale and bloodied infant was soon loaded into a CVPH EMS ambulance with his mother, Courtney Facteau, and taken to CVPH Medical Center in Plattsburgh.

Afterward, firefighters and CVPH EMS technician Jason Laundry contacted Child Protective Services about the boy’s injuries.

“It just didn’t make any sense,” Lawliss told the eight male and six female jurors.

With 17 years of emergency-medical training, Laundry said he’s “never seen an infant stuff a baby wipe so far down his throat that it turned into a little ball.”

Prosecutors believe Ciccone intentionally caused the boy’s injuries, though the defense will argue that it was accidental.

Ciccone has said that he tripped and fell on the boy in the emotional aftermath of the choking incident.

Though they were suspicious of the injuries, each emergency responder maintained that Ciccone was visibly shaken, attentive to the child’s emergency care and fully cooperative during the process.

In court, Ciccone, who is not the boy’s father, occasionally whispered to his attorney, Allan Cruikshank, but otherwise listened intently to the testimony.

When Assistant District Attorney Kristy Sprague later displayed photos of the limp boy at the hospital, Ciccone repeatedly wiped his eyes and peered downward until the photos were removed.

Hospital personnel later took the stand and detailed the many procedures the boy underwent at the hospital, including the X-rays that revealed a femur fracture.

One nurse reported the boy’s mother said the facial bruises were the result of a “recent fall” while another nurse testified that the young mother indicated they were from a walker accident.

The infant has since recovered and remains in Facteau’s custody.

She has yet to testify during the trial, which is expected to run through next week.

Prosecution testimony will resume Thursday morning.

E-mail Andrea VanValkenburg at:

avanvalkenburg@pressrepublican.com