Shortly before heading to her job as a waitress on March 19, 1999, according to Janelle Burton, she cradled Rebecca, one of her infant twins, and noticed the 11-week-old baby was listless.
“She was very placid,” Burton said Wednesday in a DuPage County courtroom. “I sat with the baby, and I started crying. I told Len I felt like I was watching her die.”
Less than 36 hours later, Rebecca was dead, and Burton’s boyfriend, Leonard P. Milash III, was charged with fatally abusing the infant and severely injuring her twin sister, Brittney, in the couple’s Villa Park apartment.
On Wednesday, the first day of Milash’s murder trial, Burton recounted the week of her daughter’s death to Circuit Judge George Bakalis and a jury of six men and six women.
In his opening statement, prosecutor Dan Guerin told the jury that Milash, 22, had become a stay-at-home father in the months after the twins’ birth on Christmas Day 1998. Burton had gone back to work to support the family, Guerin said, and Milash was left to make bottles and change diapers.
“[Milash] was angry and frustrated at being stuck at home with two crying newborn babies,” Guerin told the panel. “So he repeatedly battered their heads and bodies.”
Two physicians who handled the case testified Wednesday that both girls had brain injuries consistent with shaken baby syndrome, as well as fractured ribs. Both girls had skull fractures, and Brittney had suffered a broken leg.
Milash is charged with first-degree murder and aggravated battery to a child. He faces life in prison if convicted.
Guerin claimed that Milash “shook and slammed” the children over a period of weeks in frantic attempts to get them to stop crying and that he later told police he would while in a rage squeeze the girls’ skulls with his hands.
In his first statement to jurors, defense attorney Dwight Adams of Barrington called the twins’ injuries “horrific” but said no one ever witnessed Milash do anything questionable to the girls.
“Mr. Milash was a caring father,” Adams said.
In several lines of questioning, Adams implied that Burton’s behavior was unusual. Though medical evidence in the case shows that some of the girls’ injuries–including Brittney’s broken leg–were inflicted as long as weeks before Rebecca’s death, Adams noted that Burton said she never noticed anything wrong with either twin.
The defense team worked to introduce a reasonable doubt as to Milash’s guilt, but the lawyers did not offer an alternative theory on how the girls sustained their injuries.
Adams said he believed that what happened to the girls “will remain a mystery at the end of this trial.”
Guerin told the panel that the “beginning of the end” for Rebecca was March 15, 1999, a Monday, when Milash called his wife at work to tell her that the child had reared back in his arms as he was leaning over her crib and struck her head on a railing. Burton testified that she went home and discovered a mark on the left side of the baby’s head.
Burton said she took the girl to an Elmhurst clinic, and she was cleared to go home. Four days later, Burton testified, she was cradling her “placid” baby, listening to Milash reassure her that the clinic doctors wouldn’t have let her leave if anything major was wrong with the baby.
Burton said she left for work that Friday, only to have Milash call her again, this time to say that Rebecca was in trouble.
“He said he didn’t think Rebecca was breathing, and he wanted me to come home,” Burton said. “He didn’t know what to do.”
Rebecca died the next day in Loyola University Medical Center in Maywood. Burton said she was unable to hold the baby as doctors disconnected her from life support because the case was becoming a criminal matter.
“I wanted to hold her while she died for the last time,” Burton said as she wept on the stand.
Guerin said Milash admitted to investigators that night that he had “slightly shaken” the girls. He was charged the next day.
Wednesday’s testimony ended with Dr. Geoffrey Silver of Loyola recounting his treatment of the girls’ and their injuries, which he said were “the result of multiple episodes of child abuse.”
