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.
