11-year-old girl takes witness stand in baby cousin’s Wake County murder trial
The star witness in a Raleigh murder trial this week was 11 years old, barely tall enough to speak into the microphone.
So the prosecutor started with some easy questions: What’s your favorite subject in the fifth grade? What did you get for Christmas?
The girl was 3 in 2012 when her baby cousin Zavion Haywood died. She was home in their Raleigh apartment when firefighters arrived to try to revive the boy she called “Zay.” (The News & Observer is not identifying the girl due to her age.)
And nearly eight years later, she told the story of what she remembered from that day, sitting in a Wake County courtroom across from James Fidel Jennings, the 35-year-old man on trial in her cousin’s death.
She and the lawyers had a secret code: Tug your ear if you need a break.
“We would play together,” the girl said of her 11-month-old cousin, “and he was happy.”
Jennings had been dating Zavion’s mother, Kamiaha Haywood, at the time. Haywood testified Thursday that she met Jennings in Moore Square, and that he was homeless at the time. He stayed part time at the apartment she shared with her sister near Crabtree Valley Mall, where he would sometimes watch their children.
On the May 2012 morning Zavion died, Haywood said, she and her sister had gone to the mall to get their old jobs back. Jennings, Haywood’s mother and the girl were at home with the baby.
The girl sat on the witness stand with her mother beside her — a rarity in courtrooms. She recalled being “on punishment” and confined to her room that morning, but said she could see her cousin in a nearby bedroom.
“I heard him crying,” she said. “I went into the room. James was there. ... He told me to get out. ... I heard him tell Zavion to be quiet or shut up.”
She followed them downstairs, she said, where Jennings lay the baby on the couch. “I remember him saying he was laying him down for a nap.”
For much of the rest of her testimony, the 11-year-old replied, “I don’t remember.”
At the time, the medical examiner reported the baby had been asphyxiated in the apartment on St. Giles Street, but for five years, police made no arrests in the case.
One big change has come since then: the victim’s cousin got eight years older and could now share her story, prosecutors confirmed.
Baby’s broken arm
Throughout the trial so far, prosecutors have sought testimony about Jennings’ temper, twice bringing up a card game at the apartment, when he got angry and cussed over losing.
Much testimony has also centered on the baby’s broken arm, an injury that came a few months before his death.
Jennings was watching the children the night before Zavion went to the hospital for treatment of the arm, according to testimony, but the baby’s young 3-year-old cousin was playing with him the morning it was discovered. Doctors told Haywood, Zavion’s mother, there was “no way” a child that small could have injured the baby so severely, she testified.
On cross-examination, Jennings’ attorney Edd Roberts asked Zavion’s mother about her going out to see friends on the night before the broken arm was reported, though her baby son had a 104-degree fever requiring four or five hours at the hospital.
He questioned Zavion’s grandmother about solid food the baby might have had the morning he died, and asked if she remembered a hospital visit two weeks before his death that involved choking and not breathing. The grandmother, Kim Bynum, repeatedly said she saw Jennings come downstairs holding the baby on the morning of his death, shortly before she called 911.
“When he brought him downstairs,” she said, “Zavion was already blue and purple.”
At another point, Roberts asked about another son’s head injury a few years after Zavion’s death, which prompted social workers’ involvement.
“Who was keeping an eye on your 2-year-old son?” Roberts asked.
Roberts noted Friday that the girl had been questioned by numerous authorities since 2012 and has given various versions of events that did not come out in Thursday’s testimony.
He also asked questions about the baby’s history of vomiting and acid reflux. With the girl on the stand, he asked if she remembered coloring a picture of her cousin with vomit around his mouth and nose.
“I don’t remember,” she said.
Testimony continued Friday.
This story was originally published January 10, 2020 at 11:36 AM.