Press Room

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Photos of Autopsy Shown To Tate Jury

HOW IT HAPPENED? Prosecutor Ken Padowitz uses a doll to demonstrate punches that may have killed Tiffany Eunick.

Prosecutors used three-foot high autopsy photos and a computer animation of injuries to 6-year-old Tiffany Eunick on Wednesday in an effort to convince jurors that there is no way the injuries inflicted on her could have been accidental. Lionel Tate, 13, is charged with First-degree murder of his playmate and faces life in prison if convicted. He was 12 when Tiffany was killed. Jurors, who were warned that they would be confronted with graphic photos, were composed as the bulletin board-size pictures of the little girl's damaged body were shown by prosecutor Ken Padowitz.

Lionel sat impassively throughout the day, sometimes shielding his face from photographers, sometimes scribbling a birthday wish list. He turns 14 on Jan. 30. His mother, a potential witness, has not been allowed in the courtroom. Lionel's attorney says he was imitating moves he had seen on his favorite professional wrestling shows. The injuries inflicted July 28,1999, while Lionel's mother napped upstairs in her Pembroke Park town house couldn't possibly come from normal children's play, a Georgia pediatrician who is a national expert in child abuse testified. The injuries were consistent with child abuse, and would have been extremely painful for the little girl, he told jurors.

Prosecutors do not have to prove that Lionel intended to kill Tiffany to convict him of first-degree murder. They have to convince jurors only that he meant to abuse her. "These are not the sort of injuries from kids running and hitting things, or from a normal fall," said Dr. Randall Alexander, who is part of the American Academy of Pediatrician's child abuse committee. "This would be something more like falling out a second or third story window, or a car crash."

STATEMENTS DIFFER

Padowitz played a videotape of Lionel re-enacting what he did to Tiffany several months after her death, using his psychologist in her place. According to Lionel, he and Tiffany were play wrestling, punching each other in the abdomen. He then grabbed her by the arm and flung her into the couch, as if he were a wrestler tossing an opponent over the top rope. He did it again, he said, but tripped over a coffee table and accidentally flung her into a steel spiral staircase. Today, jurors will hear an audiotape of Lionel's statement to police two days after Tiffany's death. In it, he recounts things differently, saying they were watching cartoons and playing tag when he gave her a bear hug. She felt sick, and he accidentally hit her head on the coffee table while trying to place her head on a pillow, he said in the statement to police.

MASSIVE INJURIES

Alexander said neither one of those scenarios would account for the massive internal injuries Tiffany suffered. "It couldn't cause the brain injuries and it couldn't cause all of the internal injuries that we see, "he said. Her brain was bruised in three places, and her skull was cracked. Her liver was so badly lacerated that a piece of it was sliced off, and there was hemorrhaging in the soft tissue around it. Her kidneys were also bruised. Jim Lewis, Lionel's defense attorney, says the injuries that Lionel caused while playing rough were compounded when his mother, a six-foot-one Florida Highway Patrol Trooper, panicked and tried to perform CPR on a tile floor to the 48-pound girl. Lewis asked Alexander, one of two medical experts the state plans to call, if it was possible Lionel under-played his roughness with Tiffany because he's a child who felt both guilty and afraid about what he'd done. "I don't think I'd draw, any distinction between children and adults," Alexander said. "Sometimes they minimize because they're lying." Sometimes they do it "' because they don't remember exactly what kind of force they used."