Matthew Torbenson, Assistant District Attorney

So the other injuries fall into three other major categories.

One is in the neck, and it could be that the injury in the neck is reflective of the same mechanisms that caused injury in the head that may have been from exactly the same event or mechanism.

But what I found in the neck was that the neck was sprained, meaning that there was hemorrhage in the neck muscles and ligaments.

And there was a very severe injury to the spinal cord, very high up in the neck at the very top of the cervical spinal cord.

And you probably know that spinal cord injuries anywhere are devastating because they cause essentially loss of motor and sensory function to everything below the level at which the injury occurs.

When you have a high cervical injury, that means that everything below that, its movement of the arms, the legs, everything, including breathing, is going to be severely compromised or completely cut off.

His injury and the severity of it were high enough that that would have been my expectation, that it would have made him what we would call a complete quadriplegic, unable to move any of the extremities, unable to feel anything below that level of his neck, and unable to breathe.

Well, I would like to go back to the neck injury, if you don't mind.

Yes, please.

So in the vast majority of instances, I would agree with you that my instinct of how to interpret this finding would be that it must have occurred

right before he received care.

Because with the spinal cord, at least in the condition it was in when he died, which is the condition it was in essentially when I got a chance to examine it, he wouldn't have been able to breathe.

And if you can't breathe, you don't survive long at all.

You have a few minutes of non-breathing before you get irreversible

brain damage and you will be essentially dead on sight.

So if this injury had occurred and been as severe as it was when I saw it at the time of the autopsy, even if it occurred when he was, you know, right before he was quote unquote found on the floor by the grandfather, that's still several minutes.

that he would have had to survive without breathing before resuscitation attempts would have been ensuing there.