The last thing jurors saw Thursday evening before prosecutors and attorneys for Marian Fraser rested their cases was a video of a giggling, playful Clara Felton taken on the day before she died at Fraser’s Waco home day care.
As the short video played, the 4-month-old girl’s mother, Lauren Felton, was on the witness stand wiping away tears, along with a number of other parents in the courtroom whose children tested positive for Benadryl while at Fraser’s Spoiled Rotten Day Care on Hilltop Drive.
“Lauren, was there anything wrong with Clara that morning you took her to day care on the day she died?” prosecutor Melinda Westmoreland asked the baby’s mother.
Felton said no, telling jurors her daughter was as happy and healthy as she appeared on the video.
Fraser, 51, is on trial in Waco’s 19th State District Court on murder and injury to a child charges in the March 2013 death of Clara Felton.
Prosecutors Westmoreland and Dale Smith and defense attorneys Gerald Villarrial and Brian Pollard will give jury summations when the trial resumes at 8:30 a.m. Friday. The jury will deliberate Fraser’s guilt or innocence after that.
An autopsy revealed the child died from a toxic overdose of diphenhydramine, the active ingredient in Benadryl and some Dimetapp over-the-counter medications.
She also is charged with 13 counts of child endangerment after hair samples from other children at the day care revealed they had also been given diphenhydramine.
A dozen parents testified Wednesday that they loved Fraser and highly recommended her home day care to their friends before Clara’s death and before their children tested postive for Benadryl months later.
Fraser, who ran the day care for 25 years before it was closed in May 2013, spent about an hour on the witness stand Thursday. She repeatedly denied that she gave Benadryl or any medication containing diphenhydramine to any of the children in her care unless directed by their parents.
Fraser said she considered the kids and their parents like family, adding they called her “Mimi.” She said she would never give the kids Benadryl because they were too young and Benadryl is not recommended for children younger than 6.
“They were my babies,” she said. “They were my family. I used to say I had my Waco family and my personal family.”
On March 4, 2013, the day Clara died, Fraser said she put her down for a nap about 12:15 p.m. She checked on her in about 15 minutes and she was still not asleep, she said.
She went to the bathroom, talked on the phone to another parent and checked on Clara again, she said. Clara had rolled over from her back and thrown up, she said.
“I scooped her up and she was unresponsive,” Fraser said.
She called for her employee to call 911 and started CPR, Fraser said.
She rode to the hospital in the ambulance with Clara and waited outside the emergency room door while doctors worked on the child, she said.
Fraser was sitting outside the door when her husband, Gary, got her to get up and go to the waiting room with him. After Clara died, she said she went over to talk to Lauren and Perry Felton and then spoke to Waco police Detective Mike Alston for about 15 minutes.
“I lost a baby, too, that day,” Fraser said.
When she got home, two police officers were there and she let them into her home, she said. State day care licensing inspectors came every day the next week after she voluntarily agreed to shut down the day care for a week.
Before that day, Fraser said she had never been cited by state inspectors.
In response to testimony from Fraser’s daughter, Fraser said she “panicked” and told her daughter to hide a box of medicine while inspectors waited outside because she hadn’t gotten the proper parental consent forms signed and she didn’t want state inspectors to write her up.
She said she was not trying to hide Benadryl from the inspectors, although Westmoreland noted during cross-examination that she lied to Alston about not having any Benadryl at the day care.
Noting that some have called Fraser the “Sleep Nazi” for her regimented nap schedule, Westmoreland asked how Fraser is the only person in the world who can get 12 babies to sleep at the same time for three hours every day.
“Have you heard that they called you that? Do you have some kind of special powers to get kids to sleep when their parents can’t?” Westmoreland asked.
Fraser said the kids didn’t always sleep at the same time and told the prosecutor that she would never do anything that would potentially harm the kids just to get them to sleep for a few hours.
Fraser agreed with Westmoreland that it would be an act clearly dangerous to human life to give Benadryl to infants, a critical element to the charges against her. But she said she did not do that.
Pressing harder, Westmoreland clicked off the names of the children in her day care whose hair samples tested positive for diphenhydramine and asked if she had an opportunity to add it to each of their bottles. Fraser said she had that opportunity because she is the one who made the bottles each night.
“Would you send your daughter to a day care where 15 children tested positive for diphenhydramine and one of them died?” Westmoreland asked.
Fraser said no, she would not.
In other prosecution testimony Thursday, Ernest Lykissa, a forensic toxicologist from Houston, said he examined the hair samples from some of the children at the day care.
Lykissa explained that infants given Benadryl are susceptible to systemic overdose because their livers are not fully developed and can’t rid their bodies of medicines like adults can.
He said the level of diphenhydramine in one child’s hair was so high that his equipment could not accurately register it. He said the child suffered tremors and seizures, but those maladies stopped after he left Fraser’s care.
“This poor soul was drowning from the inside out,” Lykissa told the jury. “He had been given so much liquid that he was drowning in his own edema.”
The defense called an expert of its own, Patricia Rosen, a toxicologist from Austin, who said that while Clara had a large amount of diphenhydramine in her system, she thinks several factors, including a mild case of pneumonia, also contributed to her death.
