Before Jordan Thompson passed away while she was out shopping, his mother claims she was informed the youngster was OK and not to worry about him waking up in her absence.
More than 18 years have passed, and Cecil Patrick Kennedy, 51, has entered a not-guilty plea to the manslaughter of the toddler on March 19, 2005, in Singleton, New South Wales, Hunter.
Bernice Swales, the mother of Jordan Swales, took her daughter and two other children to the store while Kennedy took care of the 21-month-old and his own child.
She said in court on Monday that she had considered waking Jordan up in advance and taking him with her to the shops because he had been dozing for the majority of the afternoon.
Kennedy gave her comfort.
“‘Don’t worry about it, he’ll be fine,'” Swales remembered being informed.
When she got back to the flat and discovered the toddler was not breathing, she hurried him to the nearby Singleton Base Hospital.
In a video that was played to the jury of her retracing her tracks with police, she was heard saying, “I was running as fast as I could, flat out the whole way.” She pointed out where a nurse had seen her coming while holding a mannequin as she demonstrated how she had fallen on a garden bed.
Swales told the court that she couldn’t remember exactly what Kennedy said, but it involved the child falling into or out of the bathtub.
Jordan was unable to be revived, and an autopsy revealed no cause of death. However, blood testing revealed Jordan had high amounts of an antidepressant Kennedy had prescribed in his system, according to testimony given to the NSW District Court jury.
Swales claimed that she met Kennedy after relocating to the same apartment complex in 2004.
The couple started dating a few months after their children started playing together, but things started to get tricky around a month before the toddler passed away.
She revealed that there were rumours that Cecil was seeing another woman.
Since I had just learned I was pregnant, it was actually his sister who notified me.
Kate Nightingale, the crown prosecutor, had told the jury that she anticipated the second lady would testify about Kennedy calling her on a payphone and discussing providing a child sleeping pills.
The jury will hear recordings made by hidden listening devices, including a chat between Kennedy and the mother of the toddler after they learned an antidepressant had been found in a blood analysis but were not told which kind.
While Kennedy, who had been prescribed the identical drug found in the toddler’s blood more than a year earlier, remained mute, the woman is heard saying she has never taken antidepressants and has no idea what they look like, Nightingale claimed.
Kennedy is also said to have been caught on tape telling his mother to get the tablets out of his flat.
Police discovered them in a chemist’s paper bag on a high shelf of his cabinet, according to Nightingale.
The prosecution wants to show that Kennedy intentionally killed the youngster by giving him the antidepressant, or that she was criminally negligent by leaving him in the bathtub unsupervised when she knew he was sick or under the influence of drugs.
Linda McSpedden, Kennedy’s attorney, encouraged the jurors to be impartial throughout the trial.
She warned the jury of eight women and seven men, “A case of this nature can have the tendency to arouse emotions of sympathy and antipathy.”
Try your hardest to concentrate on the evidence itself, she advised.
The trial is scheduled to continue on Tuesday and should last around eight weeks.
