British au pair Ms Louise Woodward broke down yesterday as she described how the baby in her care slipped into a coma. Ms Woodward (19) of Elton, Cheshire, is facing a charge of first-degree murder of nine-month-old Matthew Eappen, one of two children she was employed to look after.
After several hours in the witness stand during which she spoke clearly and at times confidently, Ms Woodward fought an unsuccessful battle with her tears as she told how she found Matthew unresponsive in his crib last February shortly after changing his nappy.
"His eyes were half closed, he wasn't focusing, he was gasping for breath. He looked kind of off colour, he didn't look right. He looked kind of bluish." She said she was "very frightened".
"I panicked, picked him up out of the crib. When I did, he vomited on me, or something came out of his mouth."
She added: "I thought that he had choked, so I laid him down on the floor. I put my finger in his mouth, I felt inside his mouth, there was nothing there, so I tilted his head back, and tried to breathe for him." Woodward added: "I don't really remember the exact sequence of events, I was really frightened. I put him on my shoulder, I thought he might be OK. "I walked around the house with him, I was talking to him, I went back into the kids' room, I sat down on the bed, but when I pulled him away from me, his head rolled back, and I could see there was something really wrong. He was really, really pale, he wasn't breathing, he was limp."
She said: "I panicked, laid him on the bed, screaming his name, waving my hand in front of his face. I ran into the bathroom, got a towel, wet it, put it on his face, but he didn't react."
Woodward told how she walked downstairs with Matthew and tried in vain to page both Mr and Mrs Eappen before dialling the 911 emergency number.
Asked if she had ever shaken Matthew after she discovered him in his crib, she said "yes."
She added: "I was trying to see if he would be responsive. I was clapping. I lifted him and shook him gently."
Asked if she had shaken him violently, she said, on the verge of tears, "No."
Asked if she had ever told police that she had tossed Matthew on a bed, or had dropped him on the floor, she said: "No."
She then told how one officer had led the conversation towards any possible rough treatment she may have meted out to Matthew.
She told the jury: "The officer said he had a nephew and he knew how frustrating it would be to hear a baby crying constantly and that it must have been very frustrating for me and the other officer agreed.
"They said to me `so maybe you were just a little rough with him'."
"I said `well maybe I wasn't as gentle with him as I could have been because I was trying to get the bath over quickly because he was tired'."
She added: "What I meant was I was being quicker than usual. I didn't mean that I was being rough with him."
Hours later Matthew's father, Dr Sunil Eappen, rang the Au Pair agency co-ordinator and told him he did not want Louise to spend the night in the house.