BRIGHTON — When Becky Trujillo was questioned on Feb. 14, 2012, after police responding to her Commerce City home found her 4-year-old grandson unresponsive, she couldn’t explain the boy’s injuries.
On day three of Trujillo’s trial on charges of first-degree murder and child abuse resulting in the death of Gabriel Trujillo, prosecutors played video recording of the interrogation.
In the video, Trujillo stands in a corner as she is interviewed by Commerce City detective Aran Conroy . Trujillo repeatedly talks about how Gabriel hurts himself purposefully and how she has appointments to take him to mental-health professionals to see if he needs medicine.
“That kid always hurts his head,” Trujillo told Conroy during the interrogation. “He would flail or hit his head in the mirror, then some days he doesn’t talk to nobody. He goes ‘I don’t know why I do this.’ “
Conroy initially asks Trujillo to outline the events leading to the fall that brought paramedics to the home.
In the recording, Trujillo speeds through the events of the day, describing how Gabriel had hit his head on a doorknob, and saying that later, when she pulled him by his shirt to hurry along, Gabriel fell backward over one of her dogs and struck his head on the ground.
Then she describes the boy’s backward fall from a dining room chair while she looked away to reach for a piece of chicken.
“I heard him and he said ‘Ow,’ so I run over there and said ‘Are you OK?’ ” Trujillo said. “He said ‘Yeah.’ I picked him up. Then he went stiff. He started shaking and that was all. I couldn’t wake him up.”
Trujillo said she wasn’t able to call 911 from her phone, so called her son and daughter but couldn’t reach them, so she sent them text messages asking them to call 911 for her.
But eventually Conroy confronts Trujillo with information he receiving from investigators at the hospital.
“He would have to run 50 mph and dive into a brick wall, so there’s no way,” Conroy said. “Little bumps — even 10 to 20 times per day — don’t cause that kind of injury.”
Even then, Trujillo denies any other injury occurred — accidental or otherwise.
Trujillo cried Friday as the interrogation video played.
Also on Friday, the judge ruled that the testimony of a teacher of one of Gabriel’s sisters is inadmissable and irrelevant in the case for now.
Prosecutors argued the teacher would testify about her own concerns about what was going on in the home, and about a report she made in September 2011 to social services.
The judge said any value of the testimony was “outweighed by the prejudicial effect.”
Prosecutors are expected to call their final witnesses Monday, including more doctors who treated Gabriel before his death.
Yesenia Robles: 303-954-1372, yrobles@denverpost.com or
