Tuesday, March 8, 2011

End of Day One

Having spent the first day in his murder trial, calmly listening to witnesses for the prosecution recount how he said he'd would "kill" his mother if she were taken away from him, and how agitated, depressed and angry he'd been in the months after Emily Molin had been court-ordered into a nursing home, it was the sound of his own voice that caused accused murderer Steve Molin to drop his head and weep.

It was the playing of the 911 tape of his call to Worcester County emergency service, that caused him to lose it. And yet, the voice on tape, sounded oddly unemotional as Molin tried to explain to a dispatcher where he was and that his mother was hurt real bad.

"I need an ambulance. My mom's door flew open and I ran over her," Molin says. Asked where he is by a dispatcher, Molin replies, "I'm right next to her. I need help, please..." almost as if he's trying to order a meal in a restaurant.

He tries to tell the dispatcher where he is but then starts repeating himself. "The door flew open and the truck ran over her. I backed up... Come on, my mom's in pain. I don't know what happened."

He's asked if she's breathing.

"Barely," he replies.

"Is she trapped?"

No, he says. And then this: "I'm in horror. I'm in horror..."

He goes on... "I think I backed over her. Her leg is broken in half."

"Is she bleeding?" the dispatcher asks.

"There blood all over the street... I can't see my mom. She's in a lot of pain. How far are you?"

The dispatcher assures him help is on the way.

"Is she still talking to you?" she asks.

"I'm in shock," Molin says. "Where are they. My phone is going to die."

And all this he says in that slightly detached manner he has that has caused a number of people who know him to believe he suffers from some sort of undiagnosed autistic-like disorder.

It is at the end of the 911 call, Steve Molin drops his head in his hands and then starts reaching for tissues.

Before the playing of the tape, three staff members from the Sterling Nursing in Media, where 85-year-old Emily Molin lived for almost a year, testified, recalling uncomfortable encounters with her son.

He was frequently agitated and made it quite clear to anyone who would listen that he wanted his mother to come back to their Darby home to live with him. But she was increasingly disabled by dementia and unable to feed, bath or clothe herself.

The prosecution is painting a picture of a desperate man unhappy with the cost of his mother's care and afraid that it would leave him destitute and homeless.

Judith Sweeney, a nurse at Sterling helped take care of Mrs. Molin. She said Steve came to visit his mother frequently but ended up talking to "pretty much anybody who was around."

"He would talk to me about problems he was happing. He was unhappy (that his mother was in the nursing home) and how much it was costing him. How he would be left with nothing."

On the night of Aug 31, Sweeney recalled, Molin showing up late to take his mother out to dinner. When he didn't have her back to the nursing home by 9 p.m. she called him on his cell phone and left a message. It wasn't until 10:45 p.m. that Molin called back and told her that he'd driven his mother out of the state to where his father's gravesite.

"He was very upset," said Sweeney. He lashed out at his mother's court-appointed legal guardian Carol Hershey.

"I just want to kill Carol Hershey," Sweeney recalled Molin telling her.

But, she said, he said he would bring his mother back that night but it would take several hours because of where they were.

Worcester County Det. Robert Trautman testified that after being dispatched to the scene, he discovered Emily Molin lying in the road behind her son's truck with terrible injuries to her arms, legs, chest and head. But she was conscious. She was unresponsive to questions to kept repeating two words; "Hurry up, hurry up."

Under cross examination by Public Defender Burton Anderson, Trautman admitted, that he'd failed to record exactly where the body had been found in the road before she was transported to a local hospital. She died a short time later.

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