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News - Crime & Courts

Tuesday, Nov. 24, 2009

Day care deaths: Prosecutor mulls next trial

Giese will meet with families of children who died

- jmonk@thestate.com
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A decision on which case to try convicted baby killer Andrea Person on next will be made in several weeks, 5th Circuit Solicitor Barney Giese said Monday.

"I want to meet first with the victims' families," Giese said.

Last week, after a four-day trial, a Richland County jury found Person guilty of homicide by child abuse in the 1998 suffocation death of 1-year-old Zachary Ulengchong at her day-care center.

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Members of the Ulengchong family, as well as members of the other two families whose babies Person has been charged with killing, watched last week's entire trial, Giese said.

On Friday night following the guilty verdict, Giese said, he met with the families, reviewed the verdict, and told them he will meet with them again in several weeks to discuss which case will be tried next.

Meanwhile, public defender Doug Strickler said Monday he is filing a notice of appeal of Person's guilty verdict.

Person also is charged with homicide by child abuse in the deaths of 4-month-old Elijah M. Brown in 2001 and 2-month-old Michael Harris Walker in 2007.

Although for 14 years Person operated a day care in the Columbia area, no one particularly noticed that children were dying at her center until 2007, when authorities looked into Walker's death. He had been suffocated, officials said.

That death caused authorities to revisit the other deaths at her Northeast Richland day-care center.

At a 2007 pretrial hearing, the Richland County Sheriff's Department said that in 2001, Person had wrapped Elijah in a thick blanket and left him under a heating vent.

In 1998, Ulengchong's death at first was ruled as caused by pneumonia.

But in 2007, while undergoing questioning about all the deaths, Person confessed to sheriff's investigators that to stop Zachary Ulengchong from crying and disturbing other babies at her center, she had covered his nose and mouth with one hand for 15 to 20 seconds.

Last week's trial was particularly hard-fought.

Giese and other prosecutors - although forbidden by Judge Alison Lee to mention the other deaths Person was charged with - portrayed her as a callous child killer.

At the same time, chief deputy public defender Fielding Pringle tried to show the jury Person had been tricked by clever sheriff's investigators into confessing to a horrible crime she didn't commit.

In the end, the jury took less than two hours to return a guilty verdict.

Reach Monk at (803) 771-8344.

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