Darst convicted of injuring young son

DAVE MOSIER/independent editor

The second time was the charm … for the prosecution. After a hung jury in his first trial, David Darst was convicted Thursday of child endangering following a two-day trial in Van Wert County Common Pleas Court.

After deliberating for more than six hours, an eight-man, four-woman jury came back with the guilty verdict at approximately 1:20 Thursday afternoon.

Judge Sumner E. Walters, who presided over the second trial on assignment from the Ohio Supreme Court, accepted the verdict, which was read by Clerk of Courts Cindy Mollenkopf.

The verdict was a welcome one for Assistant County Prosecutor Eva Yarger, who made a gutsy call to retry Darst after a six-man, six-woman jury deadlocked in early March, with the vote 7-5 in favor of acquitting Darst.

“I’m glad that the jury came to the right conclusion,” she said of Thursday’s verdict. “I think that’s why we trust in the jury system and I think this was the right verdict.”

Yarger said the decision was easy to retry Darst … because she really felt he was guilty. “I believed he did it, and I felt the child deserved justice,” she noted.

Yarger did say she approached the second trial differently than the first — especially when it came to presenting the medical evidence in the case. “I tried to make it (the medical testimony) simpler,” she noted. “I do it every day, all day,” Yarger said of dealing with medical evidence. “Regular people don’t.”

After the jury indicated it had reached a verdict in the case, Judge Sumner E. Walters, who presided over the trial on assignment from the Ohio Supreme Court, had Van Wert County Clerk of Courts Cindy Mollenkopf read the verdict.

Darst was charged with child endangering for injuries he allegedly inflicted on his then-9-week-old son, Logan, while he was watching him on April 22, 2010. While Darst admitted that the boy had been hurt that day, he said the baby had slipped while he was holding him and he caught and trapped him against the arm of a soft armchair in which he was sitting at the time, causing bruising to the baby’s chest and back.

Expert medical testimony from two physicians at Dayton Children’s Hospital, where the boy was taken after emergency room doctors at Van Wert County Hospital had seen him and performed some preliminary treatment on what were later found to be two subdural hematomas (bruising of the brain caused by trauma to the head).

Both Dayton physicians, Dr. Laurence Kleiner and Dr. Lori Vavul-Roediger, said the brain injuries could not have been caused by the accident, as Darst described it. Both Darst and his wife, Latricia, had also claimed that the serious injuries were caused in the two days following April 22, 2010, when others were watching the baby.

Both Darst and his wife, Latricia, who had testified on behalf of her husband, had little reaction to the verdict. The defendant now has 30 days in which to file an appeal of the conviction through his attorneys, Scott Gordon and Dillon Staas.

Sentencing was later scheduled for 12:30 p.m. Thursday, June 30, in Common Pleas Court. Darst faces a maximum prison term of eight years and a fine of up to $15,000.