TIME Innocent by Author

Author:Author
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-09-25T16:00:00+00:00

Knox with her then-boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, in 2007

Kercher on Halloween, 2007

The crime scene where Kercher was found dead

LENGTHY POLICE INTERROGATION

Melissa Calusinski

The day-care worker confessed to murder because “I was terrified” BY CAITLIN KEATING

“Each day is hard. I wish this was a nightmare and I would wake up,” Calusinski said in 2016.

Melissa Calusinski was convicted in 2011 of murdering toddler Ben Kingan in her classroom in an Illinois child-care center, injuring him as seriously as though he had been “dropped from the second floor of a building onto some concrete,” police said.

But in an interview from behind bars, Calusinski was adamant that she is innocent—despite the confession she gave soon after the boy’s death. Her case has drawn high-profile supporters. On Sept. 30, 2016, however, Calusinski’s request for a new trial after an evidentiary hearing was denied by Illinois judge Daniel Shanes, who presided over her trial and sentence. Shanes cited a lack of new evidence and a lack of doubt about the verdict.

“What people just don’t understand is how it happened,” Calusinski told People in 2016. “And I would say they probably never will, because it hasn’t happened to them.

“They don’t know what I was put through in order for me to confess.”

Speaking in the Lake County Adult Corrections Facility in Waukegan, Ill., Calusinski retraced the events in 2009 that led to her imprisonment. (She is serving a 31-year prison sentence following her conviction of first-degree murder.)

Calusinski said that shortly before the 16-month-old child’s death on Jan. 14, 2009, Ben began to fall asleep in his bouncy chair.

“He fell back to sleep and I said, ‘Ben, Ben, Ben,’ and he wasn’t responsive,” she recalled, saying she was alone for 10 to 20 minutes in a classroom with Ben, his twin sister, Emily, and other toddlers at the center in Lincolnshire, Ill.

“I touched his hand and it went limp,” Calusinski said. “[Ben’s] skin color totally changed from a regular skin tone to pale white ghost. I was freaking out in the classroom by myself.”

She remembers immediately running to the intercom and calling the front desk.

“I was like, ‘I need some help in here. Ben is not waking up,’ ” she said. “The next thing I know, I turn my head back to him, and he had orange foam coming out of his nose and mouth. I screamed into the intercom.”

Her older sister, Crystal, who also worked at the center and helped her get the job, was at the front desk when Melissa called for help.

“I ran in there,” Crystal said. “I pushed her out of the way, put Ben on the diaper-changing table and started doing CPR immediately. It’s still very hard. I think about it all the time and in my dreams.”

Paramedics and police arrived minutes later and transported the child to the hospital, but it was too late.

His mother, Amy, rushed to the hospital, notifying her husband, Andrew, on the way. Ben was pronounced dead at 4:50 p.m.—before they arrived.

According to court documents, Ben presented “in full arrest,” meaning there was no spontaneous respiration and no cardiac activity.

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