A man accused of starving a 7-year-old boy in his custody last year told police the day the boy died that he never saw any difference in the boy’s body as he dropped down to 34 pounds before dying.
“He’s always been thin. He was sick,” Jon Phillips said about Chandler Grafner, who died May 6, 2007, while in Phillips’ custody. The coroner ruled Grafner died of starvation and dehydration.
During a taped interview with a homicide detective the day Grafner died, Phillips repeatedly failed to comment about the physical condition of the emaciated boy. He repeatedly said he didn’t think Grafner was thinner than normal, even though the skinny boy had dropped 15 pounds before he died.
Grafner and his younger half-brother, Dominick Phillips, lived with Phillips, Dominick’s father, and his girlfriend, Sarah Berry. Both Phillips, 27, and Berry, 23, are charged with first-degree murder, child abuse resulting in death and other charges. Phillips is on trial in Denver District Court. Berry’s trial begins in August.
Phillips’ court-appointed attorneys claim Grafner died from complications of acute diabetes which went undetected.
Today, during the second day of the trial, prosecutors played for the jury the taped interview Denver Police homicide detective Larry Moore conducted with Phillips the day Grafner died.
Phillips said Grafner ate 2-3 cups of oatmeal the day before, along with bread and cheese.
Phillips said the two spent the night sleeping in the living room, Phillips on the couch and Grafner on the floor. Berry slept in one bedroom and Dominick in another.
Phillips said he woke around 7 a.m., showered and went to work at the Old Chicago Restaurant across the street from their Tamarac Square Apartment.
Around 11 a.m., he lost a contact wiping kitchen steam out of his eyes, so he returned home. He found Chandler awake on the living room floor, watching television and drinking a bottle of Gatorade.
“I sat down on the couch and asked Chandler if he wanted anything to eat. He said no,” Phillips said. “He was having difficulty breathing, so I gave him a nebulizer treatment (a facemask in which medicine is vaporized) which helped.”
Phillips said he decided not to go back to work in order to tend to Chandler, whose breathing had became labored again a short while later. Phillips gave him another nebulizer treatment with the mask prescribed for Dominick who suffers from asthma.
“I told Sarah he wasn’t breathing. I performed CPR on him but I must not have done it right,” he said to police. He said Berry called 911 on her cell phone.
During the playing of the taped interview, which was very difficult to understand in the cavernous courtroom, Phillips said he had no idea why Grafner died, other than he had become sick about eight days before he died.
He said Grafner hadn’t seen a doctor for four or five months and hadn’t been in school for about two months.
Detective Moore, holding photos of Grafner from January 2007, and the day he died, became incredulous that Phillips couldn’t see any difference in Grafner’s emaciated body.
“His shoulder blades are sticking out like icicles,” Moore said to Phillips. “He has no flesh on his cheeks. He looks like he is in a concentration camp. In five months, he went from a normal, healthy looking boy to a walking skeleton. How can you say he’s not different?”
Phillips didn’t comment.
“How long has he looked like that,” Moore asked.
“He looks like he’s sick,” was all that Phillips could say. He blamed the protruding shoulder blades on Grafner’s posture.
“They (Chandler and Dominick) both ate a lot. They both played,” he said.
Moore asked him what he would think if he saw a boy like Chandler at a swimming pool.
“He looked a little thinner, but that’s from the sickness,” Phillips said.
“Why was he so thin?” asked Moore.
“I’m just noticing it now (in the photographs). He’s always been thin. He was sick.”
Moore finally asked Phillips what he would say to Grafner today. Phillips couldn’t answer.
Mike McPhee: 303-954-1409 or mmcphee@denverpost.com
