Jurors deliberate in case of toddler's brutal slaying

A Dakota County jury is deciding if a Northfield man, 24, injured his 17-month-old stepson and then kept secret what he'd done as the toddler slowly died.

November 23, 2010 at 5:48AM
Photo courtesy of KSTP TV, Channel 5 Nicholas Arthur Miller
Photo courtesy of KSTP TV, Channel 5 Nicholas Arthur Miller (Dml -/The Minnesota Star Tribune)

In her closing argument, a Dakota County prosecutor on Monday chronicled a toddler's slow and painful death, allegedly at the hands of a stepfather who would become angry when others intervened in his discipline of the child.

Nicholas Miller died June 23, 2009, four days after he was shaken hard at least 10 or 15 times, Assistant County Attorney Cheri Townsend told jurors.

Suspect Tylar Hokanson's attorney said in closing statements that the state failed to prove the exact cause of death and who did it.

The arguments in Hastings capped a 21/2 week trial that told of a 17-month-old abused for months, with broken ribs, collarbones and arms. But it was the June 19, 2009, brain injury, broken back and crushed lungs that caused him to lose his ability to move and cut off his oxygen, Townsend said.

She described a stepfather who put the toddler in time-outs, including one in which he was seen sitting quietly, hands folded, face bloodied.

"We need to stop babying him; he needs to start acting like a man," Hokanson, 24, had often told relatives, she said.

But this wasn't a man, Townsend said -- he was a baby who in his final days delivered two powerful messages: Nicholas had cried hard and reached out, wanting to stay with his biological dad as he left the toddler at the Northfield home where he stayed with his mother and stepfather. And Nicholas later showed signs to those two that he was dying.

Hokanson, by his own admission, had shaken the child within hours of the dropoff. When Nicholas woke the next morning, he was beginning to decline, Townsend said.

"He is not well because he is beginning a four-day process in which he dies before everybody's eyes, and the defendant tells no one," she said.

Defense attorney Lauri Traub criticized the investigation and questioned the credibility of two former cellmates who testified that Hokanson told them he shook and squeezed the boy.

She said Hokanson "made a terrible mistake," but his shaking did not cause the death.

"Child abuse does not happen in silence," Traub said, saying that somebody in the small house would have heard as a "child cries out in pain."

Townsend countered that abuse can happen in silence -- but also pointed out that the child's mother, Melissa Hokanson, heard "a terrified scream" that evening, when Tylar Hokanson and Nicholas were alone in a bedroom.

In a videotaped interview with sheriff's investigators, Hokanson conceded that his actions could have caused the death. When he shook Nicholas, Hokanson said, he was angry with his sister-in-law for intervening in his discipline of the crying child.

Among many bruises on Nicholas were circular ones on his jaw, as if someone had grabbed his face. Of those, Hokanson explained: "I would hold my hand over his mouth because he'd scream."

Joy Powell • 952-882-9017

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JOY POWELL, Star Tribune