Murder charge stayed in baby's daycare death
A Toronto-area daycare provider is no longer facing a manslaughter charge in the death of a baby in her care.
April Luckese had been charged in January with second-degree manslaughter and aggravated assault, but her lawyer says the Crown stayed those charges in a Brampton, Ont., court Friday.
Bruce Daley says his client now faces two new charges in the child's death: failing to provide the necessaries of life and criminal negligence causing death.
April Luckese covers her face as she is taken into custody in January. (CBC) He says she intends to plead not guilty and the next court date, expected to deal with procedural matters, is Jan. 13.
Duy-An Nguyen, a 14-month-old girl, was found unconscious and unresponsive in Luckese's home — an unlicensed daycare centre — on Jan. 5 and died in hospital two days later.
Luckese was released on $ 10,000 bail later that month.
Daley said the test for the Crown in deciding to stay charges is whether there is a reasonable prospect of conviction.
"There's no doubt in my mind that any senior prosecutor looking at the evidence that's been disclosed to me would find no reasonable prospect of convicting my client ever (on the original charges)," Daley said.
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Raised in the suburb of Riverside, California, twenty-year-old college student Jason Bautista endured for years his emotionally disturbed mother's verbal and psychological abuse. She even locked him out of the house, tied him up with electrical cord, and on one occasion, gave him a beating that sent him to the emergency room. His fifteen-year-old half brother Matthew Montejo also was a victim to Jane Bautista's dark mood swings and erratic behavior, but for some reason, Jason received the brunt of the abuse—until he decided he'd had enough…
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On the night of January 14, 2003, Jason strangled his mother. To keep authorities from identifying her body, he chopped off her head and hands, an idea he claimed he got from watching an episode of the hit TV series "The Sopranos." Matthew would later testify in court that he sat in another room in the house with the TV volume turned up while Jason manslaughtered their mother. He also testified that he drove around with Jason to find a place to dump Jane's torso.
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The morning following the manslaughter, Matthew went to school, and Jason returned to his classes at Cal State San Bernardino. When authorities zeroed in on them, Jason lied and said that Jane had run off with a boyfriend she'd met on the Internet. But when police confronted the boys with overwhelming evidence, Jason confessed all. Now the nightmare was only just beginning for him…
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