MANSLAUGHTER TRIAL Co-Worker Testifies At DCF Employee's Manslaughter Trial

MANSLAUGHTER TRIAL
Co-Worker Testifies At DCF Employee's Manslaughter Trial


By CHRISTINE DEMPSEY
The Hartford Courant
March 3, 2010

Suzanne Listro was "embarrassed and ashamed" after her foster baby died in 2008 and didn't want to talk to some of her own family members about it, a child welfare investigator testified Tuesday during Listro's manslaughter trial.

Michael Pitruzzello's statements came on the third day of testimony at Superior Court in Rockville. Like Pitruzzello, Listro was an employee of the state Department of Children and Families at the time of 7-month-old Michael Brown Jr.'s death. The death prompted a series of changes at the child protection agency; Listro had been accused of abusing her adopted 3-year-old child twice before Michael died.

Tuesday afternoon, Pitruzzello testified that he received a call about the death of a child at 10:45 p.m. on May 19, 2008. When he arrived at Hartford Hospital, he said, he found a distraught Listro, "slumped over." He asked her about the status of her 3-year-old son, and she said the boy was with her sister in Massachusetts. She said she had other relatives, but "she felt embarrassed and ashamed and didn't want to talk to them at that time," he testified.

She told Pitruzzello that sometime after 7 p.m., after she had changed the baby's diaper on her bed in her Mansfield home, she "heard a thud," and heard Michael crying, he testified.

She picked him up, but he stopped crying and went limp, she told him. She tried to resuscitate him, and called 911, Pitruzzello testified.

The state, however, concluded that Michael's death was not an accident. His fatal injuries were consistent with the baby's having been shaken, Dr. Paul Kanev testified Monday.

The baby's biological father, Michael Brown Sr., and half-brother, Marco Rivera, also testified Tuesday. They said during cross-examination by one of Listro's lawyers, Hubert Santos, that the baby was capable of rolling over.

Brown Sr. also described the events that caused him and the baby's mother to lose custody of Michael less than two weeks before he died. He said he and the mother, Angelica Burgos, left the baby with a neighbor to get high, returning two days later.

He also described the last day he saw the baby, during a DCF-supervised visit. Michael had a cold and looked "underweight," Brown said, but he was cheerful.

"We fed him and played with him," he said. "I held him in my arms."
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