Juror appears to faint during doctor's testimony at trial for Jayden Perkins murder
The trial of 11-year-old Jayden Perkin's alleged killer halted suddenly Thursday as a juror appeared to faint during an ER doctor's graphic testimony.
The juror jerked backward, then fell to the floor as Dr. Andrea Geddes explained that Jayden's mother, Laterria Smith, had been stabbed 15 times by her ex-boyfriend Crosetti Brand.
Brand, who is representing himself without a lawyer, is on trial for allegedly stabbing his ex-partner the day after he was paroled, then fatally stabbing the woman's son Jayden when he tried to help her.
"Do we need to call an ambulance?" Judge Angela Petrone asked late Thursday morning as the witness switched from giving testimony to helping the juror.
"Did you feel like the whole room blacked out?" the doctor asked the juror. "You're all right."
The judge ordered Brand and the jury out of the room as paramedics entered the courtroom. The juror declined to be taken to a hospital, but was then dismissed from the jury. One of three alternate jurors has taken her place.
The episode happened on the fourth day of the Brand trial, as the ER doctor was midway through explaining her treatment of Jayden and his mother as the pair was stabbed on March 14, 2024.
Prosecutors have said Brand pushed through a door of Smith's Edgewater apartment, in the 5900 block of North Ravenswood Avenue, just as Smith was unlocking it to take her children to school.
The doctor said she observed a deep cut in the bottom of Jayden's neck, just above the boy's chest. The boy showed no signs of life as paramedics performed chest compressions on him and brought him to the emergency room of St. Francis Hospital in Evanston.
The doctor opened Jayden's chest in an attempt to remove possible blood that had entered the boy's chest and kept his heart from bleeding, she testified. She did not find blood around the boy's heart, but did discover a "very large" amount of blood in the boy's right chest. She said Jayden's internal damage showed that a sharp object had entered in a "downward trajectory" into the boy's chest cavity.
The doctor said she observed 15 lacerations to the mother's body: Two to the front of her neck, four to the upper chest, six to her back, one on her head and two on her hand. Smith's 15-week-old fetus was uninjured in the attack, she said.
Earlier in the week, jurors heard testimony from Jayden's mother and, on Wednesday, his grandmother, who described hearing screams over the phone as Brand allegedly pushed his way into the apartment.