Lytle trial goes to jury

After two weeks of harrowing testimony about the death of 4-year-old Summer Phelps, a Spokane jury must now decide whether Summer’s father played a central role in the escalating violence that killed her.

The homicide by abuse trial of welder Jonathan Lytle went to the jury Thursday after a prosecutor and a defense lawyer presented two starkly different versions of who was most responsible for the child’s death.

Summer’s stepmother, Adriana Lytle, has pleaded guilty to homicide by abuse – avoiding a similar trial – and is in the Spokane County Jail awaiting sentencing after the verdict in her husband’s trial.

Spokane County Deputy Prosecutor Larry Steinmetz told the jury Thursday that the Lytles turned their tiny, cluttered apartment on North Monroe Street into a “torture chamber” where Summer was systematically beaten, burned, shocked with an electric dog collar, forced to wash urine-soaked clothes, starved and dunked in a bathtub for punishment until she died March 10, 2007.

Steinmetz asked the jurors to return a guilty verdict – and urged them to focus on a central question in the tragedy that engulfed Summer.

“Did the defendant have his head buried in the sand in that apartment and not know what was going on in the last few months of his daughter’s life, or was he a willing participant in the brutal and violent actions that caused her death?” Steinmetz said.

Defense lawyer Edward Carroll tried to blame most of Summer’s extensive bruises and other injuries on Adriana Lytle, saying Jonathan Lytle worked long hours to support his family and was gone when most of the abuse occurred.

He portrayed Lytle as an incompetent parent who is nonetheless innocent of “extreme indifference to human life,” an element the jury must agree on to convict Lytle of homicide by abuse.

“He was ignorant, inept as a parent, but he was not indifferent to whether she lived or died,” Carroll said.

While the attorneys made their presentations, Lytle doodled with a pink marker on a pink notepad, occasionally staring intently at the jury.

Prosecutors erected life-sized Styrofoam cutouts of the Lytles and of 45-pound, 3 1/2-foot-tall Summer, placing them near the witness stand.

“This case isn’t only important to the defendant, but to the life of Summer Phelps and the community at large. You must listen to facts about human misery, and the suffering of a 4-year-old innocent human being who had no rights, no protection and no say,” Steinmetz said.

He outlined what was missing in Summer’s life: love, happiness, laughter, friends, parental love, security, food and nurturing. “She was under stress, she had torment, she had anguish, she was terrified,” Steinmetz said.

The prosecutor said Lytle told detectives that he beat Summer with a belt on the day of her death for moving too slowly to clean up garbage before a nurse’s scheduled visit to the apartment; that he used a mop handle to strike her in the head and push her against the bathtub where she was forced to wash clothes for more than nine hours; and that he took her out of the apartment that morning for a drive to Cheney so the nurse wouldn’t see her head-to-toe bruises.

Jonathan Lytle’s DNA was found on long hair pulled from Summer’s scalp, Steinmetz added.

“By removing the child from the apartment on March 10, we know the defendant evaded medical care for Summer. … If the nurse had seen those injuries, she would have called law enforcement,” Steinmetz said.

It took Lytle an hour and a half to bring his daughter to the hospital after she was found underwater in the bathtub. Lytle told hospital personnel Summer was a “bad child” who had injured herself, Steinmetz added.

Carroll told the jurors that Lytle loved his daughter, was upset about the bruises Adriana Lytle had inflicted and was “in shock” the night of her death when he brought her to the hospital after he and his wife failed to revive her.

Although he had shown little emotion earlier that night, Lytle cried in the car when police drove him to the Public Safety Building for interviews, Carroll said.

“The state would have you believe that Jonathan did not care that his daughter had died,” he added. Carroll said the Lytle family was poor, socially isolated and refused state help for Summer and their infant son because they’d had a bad previous experience with Child Protective Services.

A neighbor listening on the other side of the wall testified during the trial that he heard both parents in the bathroom on the night of Summer’s death.

“Was Jonathan there the whole time? His testimony says he was not. Was he in there for a sufficient time to have participated in killing Summer? That’s for you to decide,” Carroll told the jurors.

The jury begins its deliberations at 9 a.m. today.