Andrea Dunlop

I wish I could tell you more about who Nolan was in his brief life.

There are only two photos I could find of him, the one in the Sarasota Herald Tribune and another one from Facebook that was taken about a month before his death.

In the latter photo, he has a huge gummy smile.

I wish I could have spoken to someone who loved him, but unfortunately I was unable to get in touch with Danica or Larry, though both spoke lovingly of him in their interviews.

Their anguish at his death comes through.

It has always troubled me the ways in which Nolan has been mostly erased from the story of his own tragic death, which has instead become a story about doctors rushing to judgment and the Marine who is allegedly wrongfully accused of his murder.

What I can tell you about Nolan was that he was a baby with a family who loved him and three siblings who will be forever marked by his absence.

Like every child, Nolan Kelly deserved to be safe in his home.

He deserved to live.

Two days after Nolan's death, an autopsy was performed by Dr. Russell Vega, the district's chief medical examiner.

This autopsy confirmed that the child had numerous rib fractures at different stages of healing, brain swelling, retinal nerve hemorrhages, blood in the chest cavity, as well as spinal fractures slash dislocation and disc laceration.

Dr. Vega confirmed that the cause of death was inflicted brain and spinal cord injuries.

The manner of death was ruled a homicide.

A big part of John's argument is about this spinal cord injury that Dr. Vega identified, and one particular sentence in his two-page autopsy report, where Vega writes that the spinal cord injury alone in the state of evolution at the time of death would have rendered this child quadriplegic and could have caused death rapidly.

The thinking goes, therefore, that the injuries Nolan was exhibiting symptoms of in the 24-hour period before the 911 call, the seizures, the lethargy, and the vomiting, could not have been responsible for his death because he wouldn't have lived an additional 24 hours after the spinal cord injury observed by the medical examiner.

Here's Dr. Vega going into a bit more detail about Nolan's injuries.

Yeah, so that was where the timeline seems to really come into play, because it was your opinion that the injury that you saw must have

Yeah, rendered him, you know, quadriplegic right away.

So that so then when we're looking at the sort of timeline, so sort of must have happened in a pretty brief time period before the grandfather who was, you know, one of the adults that was with him that morning, called 911, and then he ends up being taken to the hospital.

And yeah, that's my understanding of that.