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Prosecution rests in minister’s abuse trial
Autistic boy’s father weeps at details of his son’s death at church
The last two hours of an autistic 8-year-old boy’s life were revisited in such excruciating detail in court Wednesday that his father, Terrance Cottrell Sr., began to cry in his seat in the gallery.
It was the second day in the trial of minister Ray A. Hemphill for felony child abuse in the two-hour, physical “prayer service” at his Faith Temple Church of the Apostolic Faith on Aug. 22 that left 8-year-old Terrance Jr. dead from what the county medical examiner said was suffocation. The prosecution rested its case late Wednesday, relying largely on police accounts of what Hemphill and church members said went on that night.
The father began weeping openly as Milwaukee police Detective Djordje Rankovic relayed what Pat Cooper, Terrance Jr.’s mother, told him about the church service, which came at the end of a three-week series of rituals intended to invoke holy help with the boy’s autism. There was reportedly singing, praying and a laying on of hands while the preacher pleaded into the struggling boy’s ear for the demons to leave.
“Terrance would be forced to the floor and pinned down with Minister Ray Hemphill holding his head down, with his knee pinned across Terrance’s chest to keep him from moving,” said Rankovic, reading from a page of notes from his Aug. 25 interview with Cooper.
The scene, always with Hemphill holding the boy down, repeated itself in up to a dozen nightly prayer services over three weeks, according to the statements Cooper and other witnesses had given police. Through the first two days of the trial, police read various summations of their interviews with participants in the rituals, all of whom had cited their Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination to keep from being called as witnesses.
At one point, with Hemphill watching studiously from the defense table, prosecutor Mark S. Williams hauled a wooden chair into the witness box so he and police Detective William Beauchene could re-create a scene from Beauchene’s interview with Hemphill.
“He stated that he had to lie across his chest with his own chest and arm to control Terrance,” Beauchene said.
Then he acted out the demonstration that he said Hemphill had given in the police car, stretching his arm and torso across Williams’ chest.
Much of Wednesday’s testimony was spent in contentious interrogations of medical experts by Williams and defense attorney Thomas Harris, who repeatedly sought to have the doctors Williams had summoned admit that there was a possibility the boy had overdosed on drugs rather than suffocated in the preacher’s restraint.
Both County Medical Examiner Jeffrey Jentzen and toxicologist Richard Tovar said they believed the amounts of medications in Terrance’s system most likely hadn’t caused an overdose. Jentzen, who conducted Terrance’s autopsy, said the collapsed blood vessels in Terrance’s eye, the fluids in his chest and the internal bleeding in his neck indicated a death by undue restraint.
Tovar testified that an anti-psychotic drug Harris called especially dangerous had been given to Terrance Jr. in graduated doses over a period of months, meaning it wasn’t likely to have suddenly triggered a reaction Aug. 22.
“Unlikely leaves open room for possibility,” Harris said.
Wednesday’s proceedings turned testy toward the end, with Circuit Judge Jean DiMotto noting that she had been forced to interrupt the questioning of Tovar “more, I think, than I’ve ever done.”
She blamed attorneys’ exhaustion for the difficulties, even though she had admonished each at least once before lunch.
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