A Duquesne woman who police say tried to blame her infant son’s death on her 3-year-old daughter will face trial on charges that she killed the baby during a night of drinking.
Alisha L. Parker, 26, was held for court Friday on homicide and child endangerment charges after a preliminary hearing in Downtown Pittsburgh.
Parker is being held in the Allegheny County Jail without bail in the death of her son, Dai’von Means, who was three months old when he died in January.
Her lawyer, Lisle Weaver, said his client was grieving.
“It’s absolutely terrible what happened to Dai’von,” Weaver said.
Duquesne police were dispatched Jan. 7 to Parker’s home in the 300 block of Hemlock Alley at 1:57 a.m. for a report of an unresponsive infant.
Paramedics administered CPR to Dai’von and took him to UPMC McKeesport hospital, where he died at 7:30 a.m. A medical assessment noted bruising and swelling on the left side of Dai’von’s head.
The Allegheny County Medical Examiner’s Office said blunt force trauma to the head caused Dai’von’s death, which was ruled a homicide. His injuries included bruising to the head, a skull fracture and subdural hemorrhage, or bleeding near the brain.
Allegheny County Police detectives James Grill and Nicole DePaoli went to the hospital, where they said Parker blamed Dai’von’s death on her daughter.
“If there’s anything that happened out of the ordinary, my 3-year-old child did it and you need to do something about that,” Parker told the detectives, unsolicited, according to a criminal complaint.
Later, when police searched Parker’s residence, she again suggested that detectives question her daughter.
“Dai’von was smiling before he went to bed, and that’s why I feel like that little-[expletive] girl had something to do with it,” Parker said, according to the complaint. “Hey, I’m sorry to say that’s my kid and all. But if she did something to my son, she gotta go.”
The medical examiner’s office determined that despite Parker’s suggestion, “the injuries were inflicted by an adult and could not be inflicted by a 3-year-old child,” the complaint said.
Police said Parker’s room “was in disarray,” and the bed Parker shared with her daughter and Dai’von was wrapped in plastic and had no sheets.
The night before Dai’von’s death, Parker’s upstairs neighbor left their son with Parker while at work. The witness, who was not identified by police, later “spoke to Parker on the phone and could hear Dai’von crying in the background,” the complaint said.
“Witness 1 described this cry as an angry, hungry-type cry,” the complaint said.
The witness told police that Parker was intoxicated and had been drinking alcohol. When the witness got home, the two drank “a few shots” of tequila together around 1 a.m., according to the complaint.
Police said Parker told them that she had six shots of alcohol. Her blood alcohol content was 0.187 — more than twice the legal limit for driving — hours after Dai’von’s death, Parker’s lawyer, Lisle Weaver, said Friday.
The witness “had a bad feeling” and went to check on Parker’s children, the complaint said. The witness found Dai’von laying on his belly between his sister and an air-conditioning unit. His ear was “noticeably white” and his hand was stiff and “almost in a fist,” according to police. He was not breathing.
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