Pelletier: ‘I Had To Take A Break’ Man Tells Jury About The Day Daughter’s Skull Was Fractured

A young Spokane father who seriously injured his fussy 3-month-old daughter by throwing her against a sofa told a jury Thursday, “I had to take a break.”

The baby had been crying for 15 to 20 minutes, David Pelletier said, and he couldn’t take it anymore.

“I tossed her,” he said.

“Did you have any intention of harming her?” asked his lawyer, Kevin Curtis.

“No, sir.”

“What did you think was going to happen?”

“I thought she was going to lie down on a pillow or something.”

Pelletier, a fast-food worker, is charged with first-degree assault, accused of throwing the 6-pound baby across the living room of his apartment on Dec. 7 with enough force to crack her skull.

If convicted, he faces up to 10 years in prison.

Courtney Pelletier survived the skull fracture, bruises and internal bleeding, but she suffered permanent brain damage.

After hearing two days of testimony, the eight-woman, four-man Spokane County Superior Court jury began its deliberations Thursday night.

Unable to reach a quick verdict, the panel is set to resume its work this morning.

In his closing argument, Curtis portrayed the 20-year-old defendant as a loving but unskilled parent who didn’t know how to care for a baby.

“In a way that none of us could imagine, he was putting Courtney down - in a terrible fashion,” Curtis said.

Pelletier should be convicted of a much lesser charge of third-degree assault, Curtis argued, because he didn’t intend to harm his daughter.

But Deputy Prosecutor Dawn Cortez questioned how Pelletier could have failed to understand how fragile the baby was.

She had been born a month premature and required special medical attention for a few days, Cortez said.

Over the next three months, Pelletier frequently was left alone with the baby while his fiancee, Tina Williams, worked a couple of jobs.

In his sometimes tearful testimony, Pelletier admitted knowing how to change a diaper and make baby formula but said he didn’t know how to care for a sick infant.

Courtney was unusually fussy that night, he said, because she was coming down with a cold.

While Williams was out babysitting, Pelletier said he became frustrated because he couldn’t stop his daughter from crying.

Pelletier said he walked around the West Sharp apartment with the baby, trying to comfort her.

“I kept saying, ‘What’s the matter, baby? It’s OK, Daddy’s here.’

“She just kept crying. I didn’t know what to do. I got to the point where I knew I was going to lose control and I had to get her out of my hands.”

He said he raised the baby over his head, shook her and threw her at the sofa, which was strewn with pillows. Her tiny body slammed into the wooden armrest instead.

Pelletier said he reached for his cigarettes, then realized the baby wasn’t breathing.

He was splashing water on the baby’s face in an unsuccessful attempt to revive her when Williams returned home. She took one look at her daughter, screamed and ran to the phone to call 911.

Cortez said the young father deserves no sympathy.

Before he panicked, he could have called his fiancee, relatives or the Vanessa Behan Crisis Nursery for help, she said.

Or he could have simply put the baby down.

“He had choices at the moment,” Cortez told the jury.

“…Ask yourself how reasonable it is to do what he did to a baby after 15 to 20 minutes of crying.”

, DataTimes