The Cortland County Courthouse (Cortland Voice file photo)
A McGraw man accused of murdering his girlfriend’s two-year-old admitted in a video-taped police interview played in court Tuesday that he waited two to three minutes after the girl stopped breathing to call 911, while a police sergeant testified he found a hair embedded into an indent of the wall in the girl’s apartment. The prosecution argues the hair belonged to the toddler and is evidence Dorian G. Bohn slammed her head against the wall, killing her.
Kassidy Dains died of a fatal head injury on April 19 while in Bohn’s care and after sustaining 50 injuries, according to both the prosecution and the defense.
Bohn, 29, who shared an apartment at 11 Elm St. with Dains and her mother, was indicted on charges of second-degree murder and first-degree manslaughter, felonies, as well as endangering the welfare of a child, a misdemeanor.
Bohn told Lt. Todd Caufield, the officer in charge of the investigation division of the Cortland County Sheriff’s Office, in the recorded interview the night of Dains’ death that he heard a thud when Dains fell from the top of a bunk bed in her room.
When he picked her up off the floor her breathing was “erratic” and he laid her down on the couch next to him in the living room, Bohn told Caufield.
“I went back to watching TV,” Bohn said. “And then she stopped breathing and I called 911.”
But before he called, Bohn said he tried slapping the girl and splashing water on her face, and then attempted CPR for two to three minutes.
Dains was on the couch with Bohn for about 15 minutes before he called 911, Bohn told Caufield.
In other testimony Tuesday, Sheriff’s Office Sgt. Investigator Mark Starner described finding a dent in the wall outside the two-year-old’s bedroom with a hair in it.
“Upon further inspection of the damaged area, using just a flashlight, we noticed that a hair was embedded in to the wallboard,” said Starner. Starner and two other Sheriff’s investigators used a utility knife to remove a swath of the sheetrock containing the dent with the hair for scientific analysis at the state police lab in Albany. “The hair was embedded enough that it would maintain itself there (during removal and transportation).”
The damaged wallboard also had brown spots on it sent to the lab for analysis.
Testimony did not address the results of the lab analysis on Tuesday.
Bohn’s upstairs neighbor, Katrina Thorne, testified Friday she heard a very loud noise come from Bohn’s apartment between 7:07 p.m. and 7:36 p.m.
“I heard a thud,” Thorne said. “It rattled the dishes in my kitchen.”
Thorne said she had never heard such a loud noise come from the apartment before, but that earlier that evening, between 5 and 6, she heard a loud voice “...like someone was yelling at a child.”
