Child abuse expert: Baby was neglected in Modesto home, starved to death

A prosecution-hired child abuse expert testified on Tuesday that 3-month-old Ashayla Jackson suffered from starvation for at least a few weeks before she was found dead inside a Modesto home.

“Essentially, she died from neglect,” said Dr. James Crawford-Jakubiak, the medical director at the Center for Child Protection at Children’s Hospital and Research Center in Oakland.

The child’s mother, Christine Marie Rocco, is accused of letting her daughter die. Rocco is on trial and is charged with second-degree murder in the baby’s death.

Ashayla was found dead the morning of Jan. 11, 2009, on a bedroom’s carpeted floor wearing nothing but a diaper and wrapped in a blanket.

The prosecution says the infant was emaciated with dirty pale skin and sunken eyes, and rigor mortis had already set in. The defense says the child had suffered from diarrhea that caused sepsis, and Rocco was waiting for a Medi-Cal card to take the baby to a doctor.

The child abuse expert was hired to review the murder case, including the child’s birth records, medical records, sheriff’s reports and other documents collected as part of the investigation. Crawford-Jakubiak determined Ashayla starved to death.

He testified that this child’s starvation was “quite frankly one of the most extreme cases I’ve ever seen.”

He told the jury that it’s difficult to know whether intervention would’ve saved her life, considering how malnourished and dehydrated she was. Maybe she could’ve been helped if someone had intervened two weeks prior to her death, Crawford-Jakubiak said.

Ashayla’s condition didn’t occur overnight, he testified, and she would’ve appeared as “someone who is horrifically sick” on the night before she was found dead. The expert said in court that a competent adult would’ve recognized that this baby needed medical care, and that someone needed to call 911 to respond to this critical emergency.

Bottles and containers of baby formula and Pedialyte were found in the room with the baby. Rocco told authorities that she had been feeding her child about 6 to 8 ounces of formula, but the girl had been suffering from diarrhea.

During cross-examination, Crawford-Jakubiak said 9 grams of curdled material was found in the baby’s stomach. He said that was just a residual presumably of formula the baby had ingested, and he doesn’t know how much the baby had been fed.

“I do believe the baby was fed; I can’t tell you how much,” Crawford-Jakubiak said on the witness stand.

He said infants will cry when they’re hungry, but not when their crying fails to result in anyone feeding them. He called it a “learned helplessness” some neglected children will develop over a period of time. Plus, a malnourished child could lack the energy needed to be demonstrative, according to Crawford-Jakubiak.

A forensic pathologist has testified that the child died from sepsis caused by a diaper rash that stemmed from severe malnutrition, dehydration and starvation.

The child abuse expert said Ashayla’s condition was the result of not feeding the baby. He said, “At the end of the day, she was starving to death.”

This story was originally published May 17, 2016 at 7:19 PM with the headline "Child abuse expert: Baby was neglected in Modesto home, starved to death."