It’ll be three months before Amanda Dumont and Scott Bakker, a former couple from Strathroy, learn their fate after the death of Dumont’s 20-month-old son.
Lawyers finished closing arguments inside a London courtroom Wednesday afternoon, in a trial that is coming to an end more than three years after little Ryker Daponte-Michaud died from dehydration and shock on May 21, 2014. Three days before, he’d been badly burned by a cup of hot coffee.
But evidence of how bad those burns were in the days following the incident at Dumont’s Penny Lane home in Strathroy rely on “frail” human memory, pointed out Justice Renee Pomerance.
“The judge has to be satisfied beyond a reasonable doubt that the nature of the injuries were such that it warranted intervention right away,” Dumont’s defence lawyer Ken Marley told AM980 outside of the courthouse.
“I don’t know that there’s a basis in the evidence for her to draw that conclusion. In fact, it’s my view that there’s not.”
As he wrapped up his final submissions before the court, Marley argued his 30-year-old client did what a reasonable and prudent parent should do, by cleaning Ryker and applying ointments.
“In the course of what she saw, what she says she saw, and how she saw her child react, that what she did on that day… was what a parent should do. She continued to monitor the child through that day, the Sunday, and the Monday, just as you’d expect a prudent parent to do.”
On Tuesday and Wednesday however, Marley referred to Dumont’s earlier testimony that she didn’t see her child because he was being cared for by her then-boyfriend, Bakker.
Crown Attorney Elizabeth Maguire however, argued Dumont made a marked and significant departure from her duty as a parent.
“A reasonably prudent parent, whether the child was sick or not sick… would not stay out of the room for two days,” she said.
Maguire asked the Justice to find Dumont and Bakker guilty of all charges — failing to provide the necessities of life, and criminal negligence causing death — because they both had a responsibility to provide the necessaries of life and because they demonstrated “complete and utter indifference to the life of Ryker.”
The Crown called Dumont and Bakker so “selfish and self-absorbed” in their own lives that they simply forgot the child as he lay dying quietly in his crib, because “they couldn’t hear him and couldn’t see him.”
It’s the second time the trial has gone before the court.
Roughly six months ago, the first trial was called off after Dumont became sick with appendicitis. She had surgery but was unable to participate. The case was declared a mistrial in December 2016.
A few days later, one of the jurors died by suicide.
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