-
You must be logged in to see or use the Shoutbox. Besides, if you haven't registered, you really should. It's quick and it will make your life a little better. Trust me. So just register and make yourself at home with like-minded individuals who share either your morbid curiousity or sense of gallows humor.
- Thread starter Dakota
- Start date
BreakTheSilence
Well-Known Member
This witch should be fried. What she did to Spencer was unthinkable. God bless the grandparents for stepping up and never giving up on Hailey. God bless you, Grandma and Hailey as you live your lives. Hailey is a very lucky little girl to have such awesome Grandparents who never gave up on her. Your sons are in Heaven smiling down on you and proud beyond words. Hailey's father would be so proud.
Bill Byers
New Member
When Spencer was life flighted to the hosp in April it was three days after he was returned to Amanda and Stuart from his Mother who had him over the weekend and returned him on Sun. Spencer was injured on Wednesday. But Amanda pointed the finger at Jessica in an attempt to throw the blame off of her and it worked. DHS then required Jessica and family could only see Spencer with supervised visits. In Iowa supervised visits are not free and Jessica and family just could not afford them. You can thank good old DHS for that. They wanted to remove the Reverias from the picture because they were complaining about how Spencer was being treated.....You cross DHS and they don't get mad....they get even and we speak from personal experience.
Bill Byers
New Member
Spencer Corson
27You are hereHome » News » Ames and Story County
8:00 am - January 09, 2012 — Updated: 3:57 pm - January 09, 2012
The short, sad life of Spencer Corson
Spencer Corson, 3, died June 24, 2008. His father’s girlfriend, Amanda Porter, was convicted of first-degree murder in his death.
Hailey Byers’ grandparents took this photo of her to document their claims that she was being abused.
By Luke Jennett
Staff Writer
In 2005, two children are born into the world.
A little boy, and a little girl.
Neither arrive to good circumstances. The little boy is born sick and small, five weeks early, with a host of medical problems, including a cleft palate. Mom is an 18-year-old high-school student. Dad will, within a few years, be charged with felony burglary, although he will plead to a serious misdemeanor.
The little girl is the product of a one-night drunken encounter between two roommates who didn’t know each other well before and didn’t like each other much after. She’ll never meet her father; he’ll die in Iraq before she’s born. And Mom … Mom has some problems.
Two separate lives marked by medical problems, by state intervention, by custody battles. By people who loved them, and who wanted the best for them.
In 2008, at the age of 3, a little girl is rescued, and a little boy dies violently.
This is the story of the short, sad life of Spencer Corson — how the people who tried to help him failed, and how his death might have saved someone else’s life. It’s the story of a murder that might have been prevented, and how two lives were connected in the most terrible of ways.
By an act of unthinkable cruelty.
***
Dianna Rivera loved her grandson.
She didn’t always love the idea of him, she admits. In 2004, she learned that her daughter, Jessica Rivera, and her daughter’s boyfriend, a guy named Stuart Corson whom Dianna didn’t much care for, had been physical together. The day she learned about it, she took her daughter home and handed her a pregnancy test.
Jessica said she didn’t want it. Dianna insisted.
“I had a feeling,†she says.
Years later, the memory of it makes her smile a little.
“She’s young, and he’s young, so of course,†she says. “Sure enough, it was positive.â€
The next few months were difficult. Jessica is a small girl, and the doctors classified the pregnancy as high-risk. The tension between mother and daughter strangled off communication. Eventually they were told to expect that Jessica’s baby will be born with Down syndrome.
“We were prepared for that,†Dianna says. “Whatever happens, he’s a child, he has to be loved and cared for.â€
Her face lights up when she talks about his birth. In certain ways, Spencer was a miracle child. For all the problems he was born with, it wasn’t nearly as severe as the doctors had predicted.
“He was a beautiful, wonderful child,†she says.
Like his mom, Spencer was tiny. Five pounds, four ounces. He had a cleft palate that would require special feeding throughout his life, and later have to be fixed with surgery. He had a horseshoe kidney, a heart murmur and lung problems. But all that was for later. On that day, Dianna held her grandson in her arms for the first time and he was perfect.
“After I saw him, I wasn’t mad anymore,†she says. “It just touched my heart. It just melted me. He was just baby Spencer.â€
She thinks of him, and the smile lingers. But only for a little while.
“I just can’t understand how anybody could ever hurt him,†she says.
***
Casey Byers was a student at Iowa State University in 2004. In what must have been a difficult conversation, he explained to his father, Bill, what had happened: a one-night rendezvous with a girl he barely knew resulted in a pregnancy he never expected.
Her name was Amanda Porter, one of three female roommates Casey happened to fall in with when he decided he didn’t want to live in the dorms. They weren’t close, Bill Byers said, they never actually dated.
Casey wouldn’t have known, for instance, that in February of 2004, Amanda Porter was charged with third-degree kidnapping in Woodbury County. She would ultimately plead guilty to child stealing, for which she would receive three years of probation.
Casey did try to get to know the woman who would be the mother of his child. But what he learned, he didn’t care for. In the end, he decided he didn’t want anything to do with her, Bill Byers said.
Casey was a soldier in the National Guard, and while Amanda was pregnant he volunteered to be deployed to Iraq. She gave birth while he was away. He died in Iraq in June 2005. He never met his daughter, Hailey.
But that didn’t mean he didn’t care for her.
There was a list, Bill Byers says, of 10 things Bill and his wife, Ann, were supposed to do if the worst happened and their son didn’t make it back to them.
“At the top of that list is, always keep Hailey safe,†Bill Byers says. “We made that promise, and we would have spent every penny we had to keep it. But it wasn’t easy.â€
They never knew Amanda Porter, but after Casey died they reached out to her. There was some friction. They were concerned that Hailey hadn’t gotten her inoculations as Amanda claimed, and eventually they took her to get them.
Finally, in January, they decided to ask Amanda to bring Hailey and live with them in Schleswig, in western Iowa. At the time, Amanda and their granddaughter were living in low-income housing with some other people; before that, they’d been living out of Amanda’s car. Partially, they hoped they could help teach Amanda how to be a good mother. But they also wanted to keep their promise to their son, even if that meant keeping Amanda under their own roof.
It was about this time that someone noticed the money was missing.
As the child of a soldier who died in war, Hailey was given a $100,000 trust by the U.S. government in November 2005. Porter was one of the conservators of the account. Her mother, Deb Smith, was the other. Any expenditures from the account required the signatures of both. In theory, at least.
By January 2006, someone had found out that several thousand dollars had been removed from the account. Only one person – Amanda Porter – had signed out the money. In the final tally, Porter had spent $42,000 of her daughter’s inheritance in a matter of weeks.
“She couldn’t account for a penny of it,†Bill Byers says.
That was the beginning of the Byerses’ relationship with Amanda Porter. By the end of it, they would fight their way through a vicious custody battle in an attempt to save their granddaughter, an attempt that might have failed but for their ability to pay for lawyers and investigators. And even then, it still might not have succeeded.
But for Spencer.
***
For the Riveras, it was the best of times.
Stuart Corson and Jessica Rivera had tried to make it work, but by the time Spencer was three months old, they were fighting all the time. They finally called it quits, and Jessica took Spencer to live at Dianna Rivera’s home.
It wasn’t easy, raising Spencer. He still had his challenges. His cleft palate wouldn’t be repaired until he was a year old, and in those early months he had to be fed from a bottle with a special nipple. They had to hold him with his head tipped down, and sometimes the formula would run out his nose. He had to use a nebulizer sometimes, and it became apparent that he wasn’t developing as fast as a normal child would.
It didn’t matter.
“We saw him for who he was, not for his health issues,†Dianna says. “He was Spencer. He was always smiling. He loved his mama.â€
When Jessica started working, Dianna stepped in to help out, and she and Spencer bonded. And there were others, a roster of “Spencer’s special helpers,†physical therapists and nurses, people who would teach Spencer about sounds and motor skills.
He walked later than other children, but he did walk, and by the time he was 2 he was running, zipping around the house with other kids who’d come to visit, and toddling after their dog, Fifty, whom Spencer took as a special friend.
“It was beautiful,†Dianna says. “He wasn’t running into stuff. I don’t understand why they would lie about that.â€
Dad was in his life, too. Stuart and Jessica were having a custody fight and ended up going through a mediator who suggested they share Spencer, each family taking him one week at a time.
But trouble came in June 2006. Spencer went to the hospital to have his palate repaired. They were supposed to have him up to a certain weight by the time the operation was scheduled to occur, Dianna says, but when they checked him into the hospital, he was underweight.
“We tried our hardest, and it wasn’t happening fast enough,†she says.
The hospital called the Iowa Department of Human Services, which sent representatives to talk to the doctors and, based on that, filed a “founded report of abuse†against Jessica for failure to provide adequate food. It was the first time DHS would enter into Spencer’s short life. It wouldn’t be the last.
“They thought it had to be somebody’s fault,†Dianna says. “It wasn’t. He had a hole in the roof of his mouth.â€
(No one from the DHS was willing to talk about Spencer’s case for this story. A spokesperson for the DHS said that on the advice of the prosecutor in Amanda Porter’s murder case, the agency would not be releasing any documents or statements regarding Spencer Corson.)
Things were still good, though. Spencer was growing. But Jessica was young, and she made a mistake; she fell for a guy she met online and wanted to move to Missouri with Spencer. Stuart balked. In the end, she signed papers giving Stuart custodial guardianship of the child. Dianna only found out later.
“I wish she hadn’t done it,†Dianna says. “I wish she would have said, ‘OK, if he can’t go, I won’t go.’ But that’s not what happened.â€
Stuart was good about it. He let Dianna take Jessica’s visits. Four or five months later, Jessica was back, but by then she was only allowed weekend visits with Spencer. Spencer spent most of his time with his dad.
And his dad’s new girlfriend, Amanda Porter.
***
Amanda Porter’s parenting lessons at the hands of the Byers hadn’t worked out so well.
Later, when the custody battle went to court in September 2007, their affidavits would paint a chilling portrait of what Amanda was like while living under their roof. Ann Byer told the court that she saw Amanda slap and hit Hailey in the face and on the back on several occasions. They tried to teach her less harmful ways to deal with the child, and for awhile the methods stuck, but in the end Amanda would go back to raising her hand against the girl.
Twice, Ann Byers said, a neighbor found Hailey wandering around outside their trailer, crying because she couldn’t find anyone. The neighbor would take the girl to Bill and Ann, and they would go back inside to find Amanda surfing the Internet in the computer room.
Amanda wasn’t keeping up with her repayment to Hailey’s trust fund, either; shortly after the lost money was discovered, she and Deb Smith were both stripped of their power to withdraw from the account.
Once, Ann Byers says, Amanda asked her what would happen to the trust fund if Hailey were to die.
Bill Byers told the court that he once saw Amanda violently shaking the girl as they stood in the middle of the road in the trailer park. In another incident, at the couple’s cabin in Nebraska, Hailey was playing with the neighbor’s dog as Amanda stood five feet away from her. Bill looked over and saw that the dog’s chain had gotten wrapped around Hailey’s neck, and she was being choked.
Amanda was just watching, he says.
The final straw, Bill Byers says, was when they offered to buy her a house. The deal they gave her was that they would pay for the house and all the expenses, but she had to get at least a part-time job to help pay for the utilities.
“She looked at us and said, ‘I’m not working,’†he says. “She called her mom the next day, and her mom came to our cabin and picked her up. She hadn’t talked to her in a year and a half.â€
Amanda was out of their lives, and so was Hailey. Their contact with their granddaughter started to become less frequent. They would keep her for a week or so. Twice, when they tried to return her, they couldn’t find Amanda anywhere, and so kept her another week. Soon, Hailey started to develop abscesses, and her personality started to change. Word reached the Byerses that Amanda was dating David Buchwald, a sex-offender convicted of lascivious acts with a child, and that she’d let him take Hailey to dinner with another woman without being there to supervise.
By the time they filed court papers seeking guardianship, the Byerses hadn’t seen Hailey in three weeks. Amanda and her mom weren’t returning their phone calls. They believed Hailey’s welfare, and her life, were in danger.
The same month, DHS started to investigate Amanda. Bill and Ann told a caseworker that the last time they’d had Hailey, she’d had a black eye and bruises and welts over her lower body. They even provided officials with photos of the marks. It took DHS eight days to track down Amanda and Hailey, who by then were living with Stuart Corson and his son, a boy the same age as Hailey named Spencer, in a trailer in Story City.
When asked about the bruises, Amanda said Hailey had been playing in the living room and had hit the side of her face on a table. She said she wasn’t aware of any bruise on Hailey’s legs.
In the end, the caseworker found there wasn’t credible evidence that Hailey was being abused. The abuse allegation was officially deemed unconfirmed.
In less than a year, Spencer Corson would also reportedly run into a piece of furniture at their home. Amanda would tell a caseworker that Spencer bruised very easily, that he was very clumsy and fell down a lot. She would also say the bruises on his neck came from Spencer falling down and being hit by an opening door. Pictures of the dark, ugly mark the injury left would end up being shown to a jury, along with other photos of injuries inflicted on the child.
The photos were among those taken at his autopsy.
***
In April 2008, Spencer had a good weekend.
He went to his mom’s, and Mom took him to a birthday party. He ran around and played with other kids and had fun. Then it was back to his dad’s place. Later, Amanda Porter and Stuart Corson would say something seemed off with Spencer, that he wasn’t himself.
Then on April 16, Spencer got hurt very badly.
There were two witnesses: Hailey Byers and Amanda Porter. Hailey had been living with her grandparents in Texas, but just a week earlier the courts made them give her back to Amanda. The story Porter gave authorities later was that she was in the bathroom and had left the two 3-year-olds to play in the trailer in Story City. At some point, she said, Spencer must have climbed up on the back of the couch and fallen. When she came out of the bathroom, Spencer was having a seizure.
Amanda did not call 911. She did not rush the seizing child to the emergency room. She didn’t even call Stuart, instead sending him a text message.
Stuart was in Ames then. The words popped up on his phone saying that he needed to get home, that something was wrong with his son.
Stuart got home and found Spencer screaming, his body stiff like he couldn’t move, his eyelids fluttering. The family went to the emergency room, where Spencer was found to have a small subdural hematoma, bleeding on his brain. It wasn’t evident at first, but a later analysis of his X-rays showed a tiny fracture in his skull.
Dianna and Jessica Rivera went to the hospital as soon as they could. They’d met Amanda Porter before, as they’d traded off Spencer for a weekend. Something about the woman had always seemed off to Dianna. It wasn’t that she didn’t care for her, it was just that she wasn’t friendly. In all their interactions, Dianna says, she couldn’t recall Amanda ever speaking to her, not so much as a hello or a goodbye. Nothing at all.
The Byerses might have told her. They knew Amanda as well as anyone by then.
“She’s a sociopath,†Bill Byers said. “No remorse, no guilt. I’ve never seen her cry. Amanda doesn’t care about anybody or anything except Amanda.â€
But Bill Byers and Dianna Rivera had never met, and they wouldn’t until it was far too late to save Spencer’s life.
Meanwhile, Dianna was confused. She had heard Amanda tell the authorities that Spencer had suffered a seizure, something he’d never had before in his life.
“Actually, it all started when he came back from their house,†says Dianna, remembering Amanda telling medical workers, openly pointing at her and Jessica.
Amanda said Spencer must have gotten hurt over the two days he had spent in Jessica Rivera’s care – a story that might seem plausible enough, given that at this point Jessica had been written up for child abuse by DHS. It wouldn’t be until much later, when Dr. John Paschen, Spencer’s pediatrician, took the stand at Amanda Porter’s trial that Dianna and Jessica would learn, along with the rest of the family, that the injuries Spencer had suffered could not have been caused by a fall from a couch, that the injury had to have been intentional and recent.
In the two short months left of Spencer Corson’s life, no one would ever be able to conclusively say what had caused his seizure other than, possibly, trauma to the brain.
Dianna didn’t know that then, but she knew enough. She knew Spencer got hurt. And she knew who hurt him. And when his time at the hospital was up, and Spencer was set to be returned to his father’s home, to Amanda’s home, she knew she had to help him.
***
All told, Bill Byers said, he and Ann spent $40,000 over four years trying to save their grandchild from Amanda Porter.
“I feel bad for the Riveras because we were able to do it because we had some money,†he says. “We were able to get a good lawyer and hire investigators.â€
Bill is now a retiree, and Ann works for the school system in Texas. The money they used was from the life insurance payout from Casey’s death. They don’t have any regrets about spending it.
“Casey would have wanted us to do whatever we could,†Bill says.
But in April 2008, despite the best efforts of their lawyer, they still had to give Hailey back to her mother, Byers says.
The Riveras are blue collar to the core. There was no money for lawyers or investigators. They needed the system, and the people in it, to listen to them, to believe them. But it hadn’t worked, and now, in April, Dianna Rivera was growing desperate.
It’s a moment in time, something she thinks back on with frustration and residual anger. Dianna Rivera confronted Stacie Pratt, the caseworker with DHS who, when Spencer was released from the hospital, sent him back to the home where he was hurt, to the woman who was supposed to be watching him.
“It was a confrontation,†Dianna admits. “I specifically asked her, ‘Why did you put him back in that home? He’s in danger in that home. He got so badly hurt he had to be life-flighted!’ And she tries to tell me, ‘Well, we did an investigation. That home seems to be fine.’ Well, it’s not the home that hurt him!â€
Dianna Rivera begged Pratt: Take him from there. Give him to someone else. Anyone. Put him in foster care. Just don’t leave him alone with her again.
“She told me that the doctors in April told her that this was accidental,†Dianna says. “I found out later – we all found out later – that the doctors had said this was no accident. She lied to my face.â€
Dianna says Pratt told her it was she, Dianna, who was unsafe for Spencer. Pratt said she knows they smoke marijuana at their home. Amanda Porter and Stuart Corson have told the DHS that. There are also allegations of spousal abuse, and the two DHS referrals against Jessica Rivera, Spencer’s mom.
Dianna asked, “Are you saying I won’t get to see my grandson again?†And Pratt told her, “No, I’m saying you’ll never be alone with him again.â€
“It took everything I had not to jump over that table,†Dianna says. “I popped up, turned around and I walked out. It took everything I had.â€
Before she went, Dianna gave in to her frustration. She turned and shouted at Pratt, “I’ll see you in court!â€
* * *
In May 2008, Spencer sent back to the hospital for several days. He was checked out for what the doctors would later call “failure to thrive,†meaning he wasn’t putting on any weight. Strangely, they noted, while he was at the hospital, with his feedings done by heath professionals, he gained weight just fine. He also was examined for the seizure disorder Amanda Porter insisted that he had. They were unable to find anything.
Dianna didn’t know Spencer had gone back to the hospital until her friend told her that she read about it in the newspaper. By then, it was June, the last month of Spencer’s life. Dianna wrote DHS a letter and begged the agency again to please protect her grandchild, to take him from that home.
“I’m asking you to put aside what you think about me and my household and investigate this,†she wrote to Stacie Pratt, the caseworker. “When I was in your office, you said that you wanted to protect this child … You’re protecting him from the wrong people.â€
But it was no use. Nothing, not the Byerses’ lawyers, not Dianna’s letters, convinced DHS that Amanda Porter was dangerous. And then, on June 4, 2008, the state held a Child in Need of Assistance hearing in Story County to determine whether access to Spencer should be cut off.
The petition was filed against Jessica Rivera.
Jessica had been allowed only supervised visits with Spencer since April. Based on Amanda Porter’s assertion that Spencer had come back from his weekend with his mother with a bruise on his face, and then started having undiagnosable seizures, the state believed Jessica was the one who hurt him.
The hearing was held on the matter, and Story County Judge Thomas Hronek ordered that a social investigation be conducted and a dispositional hearing should be set for June 27, 2008.
By then, of course, it was too late for anyone to save Spencer.
***
Everything that’s known about his death are the things that happened before, and the things that happened after.
The moment itself was lost.
On June 23, 2008, Amanda Porter and Stuart Corson were living together at their home in Story City with Hailey Byers and Spencer Corson, two 3-year-old children. Stuart worked nights, slept days. He’d had the day off that day and spent the entire evening with a friend, listening to music and hanging out.
On that evening, it was just the three of them at home: Spencer, Hailey and Amanda.
Bill Byers believes Amanda killed Spencer at the trailer in Story City, and then bundled his body up in a blanket before grabbing Hailey and driving to her mother’s home in Nevada. Amanda said it was too hot in her trailer for the children, so she took them to her mother’s.
Deb Smith, Amanda’s mother, told the DHS investigators at the hospital that she never checked on Spencer after Amanda put him down to sleep in a bedroom at her house. Amanda told them Spencer had fallen asleep on the drive there, but at 6:30 p.m., when they were alone in the house, she sat him up to feed him his bottle and he’d said “hi†to her, but he’d been sleepy and just wanted to lie back down.
Smith had taken Hailey to get pizza around 6:30 p.m., and then they both left to walk Smith’s dog around 7:30 p.m. for about half an hour. That night, Hailey slept with Smith while Amanda talked to Stuart on the phone. At around 9:45 p.m., Amanda said she checked on Spencer and found that he didn’t look right.
She took the child to Smith, who described him as limp, like a rag doll.
Smith called 911. The tape of that phone call was played for the jury at Porter’s trial, and referenced in prosecutor Douglas Hammerand’s closing arguments, as he tried to prove that Amanda fit the legal definition of having “extreme indifference to human life,†a requisite to the murder charge. In it, Porter and Smith seem to casually discuss whether they should give Spencer CPR.
The verifiable narrative resumed with the arrival of Tracy Gibson, an emergency medical worker for the Nevada Fire Department. She was the first to notice the large bruise on Spencer’s forehead. She said that when she arrived at Deb Smith’s home, the two women seemed largely unaffected as paramedics tried to save the boy who was dying at their feet.
“They were very calm, collected,†Smith testified. “They were standing at Spencer’s feet a little ways away just carrying on a normal conversation, it appeared to me. There was no upset, no tears.â€
By 11:29 p.m., DHS was alerted to the case. The agency was told that Spencer’s tiny body was marked with bruises on his head, neck, arms and leg. In the report filed by DHS caseworker Jennifer Welton, two sentences seem to sum up the end of Spencer Corson’s short life.
“The parents showed very little emotion/reaction,†it reads. “It is not likely that the child will survive.â€
***
Spencer Corson was buried June 28 at Boone Memorial Gardens.
Dianna Rivera remembers the day. And she remembers what it was like to look over, past Spencer’s coffin, to where Stuart stood with Amanda. Even then, Dianna knew that Spencer’s death was no accident. She knew that he’d been killed, and she knew who’d done it.
“That was horrifying for us,†she says. “But we held our tongue because it was a sacred event. But it was hard. It was hell.â€
The police were involved by then, but Porter was still free, and that knowledge was bitter to Dianna. But worse still was the realization that her grandson had needed her to help him, to save him, and she couldn’t. That struggle had ended.
But for her, another had just begun.
“I couldn’t save my grandchild, and that will haunt me for the rest of my life,†she says. “No matter how hard I tried, no matter how hard I screamed and yelled. But I had to get that boy justice.â€
Over the next two years, Dianna Rivera were Spencer’s voice. Newspapers and television stations started to learn her name from the letters she sent, from the interviews she gave. Days after Spencer’s death, she was on TV describing Spencer’s hospital stays, saying his death was no accident.
In the aftermath, Dianna and Jessica Rivera and Bill and Ann Byers found each other, two families torn apart by one woman. Their attorney used the press coverage to buy time before they had to hand Hailey back over to Amanda. The Byerses asked Dianna to help them rescue her. She said she would. Dianna went to court for them, wrote affidavits told them Spencer’s story.
In the 94-degree heat of June 23, 2009, the anniversary of his death, Dianna and Jessica Rivera were in Nevada, sweat-soaked, holding signs and shouting, “Died at three, killer still free!†for whoever would listen. By then, the Polk County Medical Examiner had determined that Spencer Corson died of abusive head trauma as a result of an assault by another person. But Amanda Porter was still walking free.
“Now I kind of understand, but at the time it wasn’t fast enough,†Dianna Rivera says of the investigation. “And I was very angry. That’s why we rallied. Our whole purpose was to give Spencer a voice. And I didn’t care who I had to piss off or what rocks I had to kick over. I didn’t care.â€
Who knows what finally tipped the scales, but on January 22, 2010, more than 1 1/2 years after Spencer’s death, Amanda Porter was taken into custody without incident by the Nevada Police Department. She was charged with first-degree murder and child endangerment resulting in death.
On the MySpace page of Bill and Ann Byers, an article on the arrest appeared on their blog under their own headline, “The Monster is caged.â€
But for Dianna and her daughter, it wasn’t over yet. There was still the trial, and they knew that the only way Amanda could shift blame for Spencer’s death away from herself was to try to pin it on them.
The trial finally began in November 2011. Some of the attacks were personal – Porter’s attorney, Mike Adams, alleged that Spencer’s injuries were the result of an undiagnosed seizure disorder caused by fetal alcohol syndrome suffered because of Jessica Rivera’s drinking while she was pregnant. Stuart Corson took the stand and told the jury that he saw Jessica throw Spencer into the back seat of his car.
And then there were the photos. The bruises on Spencer’s skin. His skull opened to show the blood on his brain. His eyes removed to show retinal hemorrhages that couldn’t have occurred from anything other than a shearing force.
And bad as it was, Dianna says, they were glad to have gotten there at all.
“My family and I fought the whole time to get to that point,†she says. “We fought our hardest. So I was actually relieved. We’re here, we’re finally here. I wasn’t scared of the defense at all, because I knew they were grasping for straws. And I knew that the truth would prevail.â€
The jury returned with a verdict of guilty on both counts, a surprise to many, including the Riveras, whose best hope was a second-degree murder conviction. It was over. Amanda Porter is scheduled to be sentenced Friday, Jan. 13.
“It was amazing,†Dianna says. “It was like a dark cloud was lifted, and the sun was shining again.â€
***
Somewhere in Texas, a little girl lives with her grandparents.
She goes to first grade now, and she’s becoming very smart. She plays sports, and goes to church. She goes to the Boys and Girls Club, and this Christmas her grandparents took her to Disneyland.
It’s warmer there than here, more sunshine. In her backyard there’s a swing set and a trampoline and even a pool. She’s a normal little kid in most respects. She likes Spongebob and Barbie dolls.
She is happy there.
***
Somewhere in Boone, a gravestone marks where a little boy was laid to rest.
***
And in Ames, near a playground at Brookside Park, a small tree stands. Its branches are bare now, but in spring the leaves will return, and in better days the clouds will lift and the sun will shine on it again. It was planted by the city, in remembrance. A plaque stands in front of it. Beside it are two posts to help it grow up straight.
Around its trunk is a tattered blue ribbon, tied there some time ago by a woman who remembers him, who holds him in her heart still.
She can close her eyes and see him running through her house laughing, playing, hugging the dog.
She can see his smile.
Luke Jennett can be reached at (515) 663-6922 or ljennett@amestrib.com.
.
27You are hereHome » News » Ames and Story County
8:00 am - January 09, 2012 — Updated: 3:57 pm - January 09, 2012
The short, sad life of Spencer Corson
Spencer Corson, 3, died June 24, 2008. His father’s girlfriend, Amanda Porter, was convicted of first-degree murder in his death.
Hailey Byers’ grandparents took this photo of her to document their claims that she was being abused.
By Luke Jennett
Staff Writer
In 2005, two children are born into the world.
A little boy, and a little girl.
Neither arrive to good circumstances. The little boy is born sick and small, five weeks early, with a host of medical problems, including a cleft palate. Mom is an 18-year-old high-school student. Dad will, within a few years, be charged with felony burglary, although he will plead to a serious misdemeanor.
The little girl is the product of a one-night drunken encounter between two roommates who didn’t know each other well before and didn’t like each other much after. She’ll never meet her father; he’ll die in Iraq before she’s born. And Mom … Mom has some problems.
Two separate lives marked by medical problems, by state intervention, by custody battles. By people who loved them, and who wanted the best for them.
In 2008, at the age of 3, a little girl is rescued, and a little boy dies violently.
This is the story of the short, sad life of Spencer Corson — how the people who tried to help him failed, and how his death might have saved someone else’s life. It’s the story of a murder that might have been prevented, and how two lives were connected in the most terrible of ways.
By an act of unthinkable cruelty.
***
Dianna Rivera loved her grandson.
She didn’t always love the idea of him, she admits. In 2004, she learned that her daughter, Jessica Rivera, and her daughter’s boyfriend, a guy named Stuart Corson whom Dianna didn’t much care for, had been physical together. The day she learned about it, she took her daughter home and handed her a pregnancy test.
Jessica said she didn’t want it. Dianna insisted.
“I had a feeling,†she says.
Years later, the memory of it makes her smile a little.
“She’s young, and he’s young, so of course,†she says. “Sure enough, it was positive.â€
The next few months were difficult. Jessica is a small girl, and the doctors classified the pregnancy as high-risk. The tension between mother and daughter strangled off communication. Eventually they were told to expect that Jessica’s baby will be born with Down syndrome.
“We were prepared for that,†Dianna says. “Whatever happens, he’s a child, he has to be loved and cared for.â€
Her face lights up when she talks about his birth. In certain ways, Spencer was a miracle child. For all the problems he was born with, it wasn’t nearly as severe as the doctors had predicted.
“He was a beautiful, wonderful child,†she says.
Like his mom, Spencer was tiny. Five pounds, four ounces. He had a cleft palate that would require special feeding throughout his life, and later have to be fixed with surgery. He had a horseshoe kidney, a heart murmur and lung problems. But all that was for later. On that day, Dianna held her grandson in her arms for the first time and he was perfect.
“After I saw him, I wasn’t mad anymore,†she says. “It just touched my heart. It just melted me. He was just baby Spencer.â€
She thinks of him, and the smile lingers. But only for a little while.
“I just can’t understand how anybody could ever hurt him,†she says.
***
Casey Byers was a student at Iowa State University in 2004. In what must have been a difficult conversation, he explained to his father, Bill, what had happened: a one-night rendezvous with a girl he barely knew resulted in a pregnancy he never expected.
Her name was Amanda Porter, one of three female roommates Casey happened to fall in with when he decided he didn’t want to live in the dorms. They weren’t close, Bill Byers said, they never actually dated.
Casey wouldn’t have known, for instance, that in February of 2004, Amanda Porter was charged with third-degree kidnapping in Woodbury County. She would ultimately plead guilty to child stealing, for which she would receive three years of probation.
Casey did try to get to know the woman who would be the mother of his child. But what he learned, he didn’t care for. In the end, he decided he didn’t want anything to do with her, Bill Byers said.
Casey was a soldier in the National Guard, and while Amanda was pregnant he volunteered to be deployed to Iraq. She gave birth while he was away. He died in Iraq in June 2005. He never met his daughter, Hailey.
But that didn’t mean he didn’t care for her.
There was a list, Bill Byers says, of 10 things Bill and his wife, Ann, were supposed to do if the worst happened and their son didn’t make it back to them.
“At the top of that list is, always keep Hailey safe,†Bill Byers says. “We made that promise, and we would have spent every penny we had to keep it. But it wasn’t easy.â€
They never knew Amanda Porter, but after Casey died they reached out to her. There was some friction. They were concerned that Hailey hadn’t gotten her inoculations as Amanda claimed, and eventually they took her to get them.
Finally, in January, they decided to ask Amanda to bring Hailey and live with them in Schleswig, in western Iowa. At the time, Amanda and their granddaughter were living in low-income housing with some other people; before that, they’d been living out of Amanda’s car. Partially, they hoped they could help teach Amanda how to be a good mother. But they also wanted to keep their promise to their son, even if that meant keeping Amanda under their own roof.
It was about this time that someone noticed the money was missing.
As the child of a soldier who died in war, Hailey was given a $100,000 trust by the U.S. government in November 2005. Porter was one of the conservators of the account. Her mother, Deb Smith, was the other. Any expenditures from the account required the signatures of both. In theory, at least.
By January 2006, someone had found out that several thousand dollars had been removed from the account. Only one person – Amanda Porter – had signed out the money. In the final tally, Porter had spent $42,000 of her daughter’s inheritance in a matter of weeks.
“She couldn’t account for a penny of it,†Bill Byers says.
That was the beginning of the Byerses’ relationship with Amanda Porter. By the end of it, they would fight their way through a vicious custody battle in an attempt to save their granddaughter, an attempt that might have failed but for their ability to pay for lawyers and investigators. And even then, it still might not have succeeded.
But for Spencer.
***
For the Riveras, it was the best of times.
Stuart Corson and Jessica Rivera had tried to make it work, but by the time Spencer was three months old, they were fighting all the time. They finally called it quits, and Jessica took Spencer to live at Dianna Rivera’s home.
It wasn’t easy, raising Spencer. He still had his challenges. His cleft palate wouldn’t be repaired until he was a year old, and in those early months he had to be fed from a bottle with a special nipple. They had to hold him with his head tipped down, and sometimes the formula would run out his nose. He had to use a nebulizer sometimes, and it became apparent that he wasn’t developing as fast as a normal child would.
It didn’t matter.
“We saw him for who he was, not for his health issues,†Dianna says. “He was Spencer. He was always smiling. He loved his mama.â€
When Jessica started working, Dianna stepped in to help out, and she and Spencer bonded. And there were others, a roster of “Spencer’s special helpers,†physical therapists and nurses, people who would teach Spencer about sounds and motor skills.
He walked later than other children, but he did walk, and by the time he was 2 he was running, zipping around the house with other kids who’d come to visit, and toddling after their dog, Fifty, whom Spencer took as a special friend.
“It was beautiful,†Dianna says. “He wasn’t running into stuff. I don’t understand why they would lie about that.â€
Dad was in his life, too. Stuart and Jessica were having a custody fight and ended up going through a mediator who suggested they share Spencer, each family taking him one week at a time.
But trouble came in June 2006. Spencer went to the hospital to have his palate repaired. They were supposed to have him up to a certain weight by the time the operation was scheduled to occur, Dianna says, but when they checked him into the hospital, he was underweight.
“We tried our hardest, and it wasn’t happening fast enough,†she says.
The hospital called the Iowa Department of Human Services, which sent representatives to talk to the doctors and, based on that, filed a “founded report of abuse†against Jessica for failure to provide adequate food. It was the first time DHS would enter into Spencer’s short life. It wouldn’t be the last.
“They thought it had to be somebody’s fault,†Dianna says. “It wasn’t. He had a hole in the roof of his mouth.â€
(No one from the DHS was willing to talk about Spencer’s case for this story. A spokesperson for the DHS said that on the advice of the prosecutor in Amanda Porter’s murder case, the agency would not be releasing any documents or statements regarding Spencer Corson.)
Things were still good, though. Spencer was growing. But Jessica was young, and she made a mistake; she fell for a guy she met online and wanted to move to Missouri with Spencer. Stuart balked. In the end, she signed papers giving Stuart custodial guardianship of the child. Dianna only found out later.
“I wish she hadn’t done it,†Dianna says. “I wish she would have said, ‘OK, if he can’t go, I won’t go.’ But that’s not what happened.â€
Stuart was good about it. He let Dianna take Jessica’s visits. Four or five months later, Jessica was back, but by then she was only allowed weekend visits with Spencer. Spencer spent most of his time with his dad.
And his dad’s new girlfriend, Amanda Porter.
***
Amanda Porter’s parenting lessons at the hands of the Byers hadn’t worked out so well.
Later, when the custody battle went to court in September 2007, their affidavits would paint a chilling portrait of what Amanda was like while living under their roof. Ann Byer told the court that she saw Amanda slap and hit Hailey in the face and on the back on several occasions. They tried to teach her less harmful ways to deal with the child, and for awhile the methods stuck, but in the end Amanda would go back to raising her hand against the girl.
Twice, Ann Byers said, a neighbor found Hailey wandering around outside their trailer, crying because she couldn’t find anyone. The neighbor would take the girl to Bill and Ann, and they would go back inside to find Amanda surfing the Internet in the computer room.
Amanda wasn’t keeping up with her repayment to Hailey’s trust fund, either; shortly after the lost money was discovered, she and Deb Smith were both stripped of their power to withdraw from the account.
Once, Ann Byers says, Amanda asked her what would happen to the trust fund if Hailey were to die.
Bill Byers told the court that he once saw Amanda violently shaking the girl as they stood in the middle of the road in the trailer park. In another incident, at the couple’s cabin in Nebraska, Hailey was playing with the neighbor’s dog as Amanda stood five feet away from her. Bill looked over and saw that the dog’s chain had gotten wrapped around Hailey’s neck, and she was being choked.
Amanda was just watching, he says.
The final straw, Bill Byers says, was when they offered to buy her a house. The deal they gave her was that they would pay for the house and all the expenses, but she had to get at least a part-time job to help pay for the utilities.
“She looked at us and said, ‘I’m not working,’†he says. “She called her mom the next day, and her mom came to our cabin and picked her up. She hadn’t talked to her in a year and a half.â€
Amanda was out of their lives, and so was Hailey. Their contact with their granddaughter started to become less frequent. They would keep her for a week or so. Twice, when they tried to return her, they couldn’t find Amanda anywhere, and so kept her another week. Soon, Hailey started to develop abscesses, and her personality started to change. Word reached the Byerses that Amanda was dating David Buchwald, a sex-offender convicted of lascivious acts with a child, and that she’d let him take Hailey to dinner with another woman without being there to supervise.
By the time they filed court papers seeking guardianship, the Byerses hadn’t seen Hailey in three weeks. Amanda and her mom weren’t returning their phone calls. They believed Hailey’s welfare, and her life, were in danger.
The same month, DHS started to investigate Amanda. Bill and Ann told a caseworker that the last time they’d had Hailey, she’d had a black eye and bruises and welts over her lower body. They even provided officials with photos of the marks. It took DHS eight days to track down Amanda and Hailey, who by then were living with Stuart Corson and his son, a boy the same age as Hailey named Spencer, in a trailer in Story City.
When asked about the bruises, Amanda said Hailey had been playing in the living room and had hit the side of her face on a table. She said she wasn’t aware of any bruise on Hailey’s legs.
In the end, the caseworker found there wasn’t credible evidence that Hailey was being abused. The abuse allegation was officially deemed unconfirmed.
In less than a year, Spencer Corson would also reportedly run into a piece of furniture at their home. Amanda would tell a caseworker that Spencer bruised very easily, that he was very clumsy and fell down a lot. She would also say the bruises on his neck came from Spencer falling down and being hit by an opening door. Pictures of the dark, ugly mark the injury left would end up being shown to a jury, along with other photos of injuries inflicted on the child.
The photos were among those taken at his autopsy.
***
In April 2008, Spencer had a good weekend.
He went to his mom’s, and Mom took him to a birthday party. He ran around and played with other kids and had fun. Then it was back to his dad’s place. Later, Amanda Porter and Stuart Corson would say something seemed off with Spencer, that he wasn’t himself.
Then on April 16, Spencer got hurt very badly.
There were two witnesses: Hailey Byers and Amanda Porter. Hailey had been living with her grandparents in Texas, but just a week earlier the courts made them give her back to Amanda. The story Porter gave authorities later was that she was in the bathroom and had left the two 3-year-olds to play in the trailer in Story City. At some point, she said, Spencer must have climbed up on the back of the couch and fallen. When she came out of the bathroom, Spencer was having a seizure.
Amanda did not call 911. She did not rush the seizing child to the emergency room. She didn’t even call Stuart, instead sending him a text message.
Stuart was in Ames then. The words popped up on his phone saying that he needed to get home, that something was wrong with his son.
Stuart got home and found Spencer screaming, his body stiff like he couldn’t move, his eyelids fluttering. The family went to the emergency room, where Spencer was found to have a small subdural hematoma, bleeding on his brain. It wasn’t evident at first, but a later analysis of his X-rays showed a tiny fracture in his skull.
Dianna and Jessica Rivera went to the hospital as soon as they could. They’d met Amanda Porter before, as they’d traded off Spencer for a weekend. Something about the woman had always seemed off to Dianna. It wasn’t that she didn’t care for her, it was just that she wasn’t friendly. In all their interactions, Dianna says, she couldn’t recall Amanda ever speaking to her, not so much as a hello or a goodbye. Nothing at all.
The Byerses might have told her. They knew Amanda as well as anyone by then.
“She’s a sociopath,†Bill Byers said. “No remorse, no guilt. I’ve never seen her cry. Amanda doesn’t care about anybody or anything except Amanda.â€
But Bill Byers and Dianna Rivera had never met, and they wouldn’t until it was far too late to save Spencer’s life.
Meanwhile, Dianna was confused. She had heard Amanda tell the authorities that Spencer had suffered a seizure, something he’d never had before in his life.
“Actually, it all started when he came back from their house,†says Dianna, remembering Amanda telling medical workers, openly pointing at her and Jessica.
Amanda said Spencer must have gotten hurt over the two days he had spent in Jessica Rivera’s care – a story that might seem plausible enough, given that at this point Jessica had been written up for child abuse by DHS. It wouldn’t be until much later, when Dr. John Paschen, Spencer’s pediatrician, took the stand at Amanda Porter’s trial that Dianna and Jessica would learn, along with the rest of the family, that the injuries Spencer had suffered could not have been caused by a fall from a couch, that the injury had to have been intentional and recent.
In the two short months left of Spencer Corson’s life, no one would ever be able to conclusively say what had caused his seizure other than, possibly, trauma to the brain.
Dianna didn’t know that then, but she knew enough. She knew Spencer got hurt. And she knew who hurt him. And when his time at the hospital was up, and Spencer was set to be returned to his father’s home, to Amanda’s home, she knew she had to help him.
***
All told, Bill Byers said, he and Ann spent $40,000 over four years trying to save their grandchild from Amanda Porter.
“I feel bad for the Riveras because we were able to do it because we had some money,†he says. “We were able to get a good lawyer and hire investigators.â€
Bill is now a retiree, and Ann works for the school system in Texas. The money they used was from the life insurance payout from Casey’s death. They don’t have any regrets about spending it.
“Casey would have wanted us to do whatever we could,†Bill says.
But in April 2008, despite the best efforts of their lawyer, they still had to give Hailey back to her mother, Byers says.
The Riveras are blue collar to the core. There was no money for lawyers or investigators. They needed the system, and the people in it, to listen to them, to believe them. But it hadn’t worked, and now, in April, Dianna Rivera was growing desperate.
It’s a moment in time, something she thinks back on with frustration and residual anger. Dianna Rivera confronted Stacie Pratt, the caseworker with DHS who, when Spencer was released from the hospital, sent him back to the home where he was hurt, to the woman who was supposed to be watching him.
“It was a confrontation,†Dianna admits. “I specifically asked her, ‘Why did you put him back in that home? He’s in danger in that home. He got so badly hurt he had to be life-flighted!’ And she tries to tell me, ‘Well, we did an investigation. That home seems to be fine.’ Well, it’s not the home that hurt him!â€
Dianna Rivera begged Pratt: Take him from there. Give him to someone else. Anyone. Put him in foster care. Just don’t leave him alone with her again.
“She told me that the doctors in April told her that this was accidental,†Dianna says. “I found out later – we all found out later – that the doctors had said this was no accident. She lied to my face.â€
Dianna says Pratt told her it was she, Dianna, who was unsafe for Spencer. Pratt said she knows they smoke marijuana at their home. Amanda Porter and Stuart Corson have told the DHS that. There are also allegations of spousal abuse, and the two DHS referrals against Jessica Rivera, Spencer’s mom.
Dianna asked, “Are you saying I won’t get to see my grandson again?†And Pratt told her, “No, I’m saying you’ll never be alone with him again.â€
“It took everything I had not to jump over that table,†Dianna says. “I popped up, turned around and I walked out. It took everything I had.â€
Before she went, Dianna gave in to her frustration. She turned and shouted at Pratt, “I’ll see you in court!â€
* * *
In May 2008, Spencer sent back to the hospital for several days. He was checked out for what the doctors would later call “failure to thrive,†meaning he wasn’t putting on any weight. Strangely, they noted, while he was at the hospital, with his feedings done by heath professionals, he gained weight just fine. He also was examined for the seizure disorder Amanda Porter insisted that he had. They were unable to find anything.
Dianna didn’t know Spencer had gone back to the hospital until her friend told her that she read about it in the newspaper. By then, it was June, the last month of Spencer’s life. Dianna wrote DHS a letter and begged the agency again to please protect her grandchild, to take him from that home.
“I’m asking you to put aside what you think about me and my household and investigate this,†she wrote to Stacie Pratt, the caseworker. “When I was in your office, you said that you wanted to protect this child … You’re protecting him from the wrong people.â€
But it was no use. Nothing, not the Byerses’ lawyers, not Dianna’s letters, convinced DHS that Amanda Porter was dangerous. And then, on June 4, 2008, the state held a Child in Need of Assistance hearing in Story County to determine whether access to Spencer should be cut off.
The petition was filed against Jessica Rivera.
Jessica had been allowed only supervised visits with Spencer since April. Based on Amanda Porter’s assertion that Spencer had come back from his weekend with his mother with a bruise on his face, and then started having undiagnosable seizures, the state believed Jessica was the one who hurt him.
The hearing was held on the matter, and Story County Judge Thomas Hronek ordered that a social investigation be conducted and a dispositional hearing should be set for June 27, 2008.
By then, of course, it was too late for anyone to save Spencer.
***
Everything that’s known about his death are the things that happened before, and the things that happened after.
The moment itself was lost.
On June 23, 2008, Amanda Porter and Stuart Corson were living together at their home in Story City with Hailey Byers and Spencer Corson, two 3-year-old children. Stuart worked nights, slept days. He’d had the day off that day and spent the entire evening with a friend, listening to music and hanging out.
On that evening, it was just the three of them at home: Spencer, Hailey and Amanda.
Bill Byers believes Amanda killed Spencer at the trailer in Story City, and then bundled his body up in a blanket before grabbing Hailey and driving to her mother’s home in Nevada. Amanda said it was too hot in her trailer for the children, so she took them to her mother’s.
Deb Smith, Amanda’s mother, told the DHS investigators at the hospital that she never checked on Spencer after Amanda put him down to sleep in a bedroom at her house. Amanda told them Spencer had fallen asleep on the drive there, but at 6:30 p.m., when they were alone in the house, she sat him up to feed him his bottle and he’d said “hi†to her, but he’d been sleepy and just wanted to lie back down.
Smith had taken Hailey to get pizza around 6:30 p.m., and then they both left to walk Smith’s dog around 7:30 p.m. for about half an hour. That night, Hailey slept with Smith while Amanda talked to Stuart on the phone. At around 9:45 p.m., Amanda said she checked on Spencer and found that he didn’t look right.
She took the child to Smith, who described him as limp, like a rag doll.
Smith called 911. The tape of that phone call was played for the jury at Porter’s trial, and referenced in prosecutor Douglas Hammerand’s closing arguments, as he tried to prove that Amanda fit the legal definition of having “extreme indifference to human life,†a requisite to the murder charge. In it, Porter and Smith seem to casually discuss whether they should give Spencer CPR.
The verifiable narrative resumed with the arrival of Tracy Gibson, an emergency medical worker for the Nevada Fire Department. She was the first to notice the large bruise on Spencer’s forehead. She said that when she arrived at Deb Smith’s home, the two women seemed largely unaffected as paramedics tried to save the boy who was dying at their feet.
“They were very calm, collected,†Smith testified. “They were standing at Spencer’s feet a little ways away just carrying on a normal conversation, it appeared to me. There was no upset, no tears.â€
By 11:29 p.m., DHS was alerted to the case. The agency was told that Spencer’s tiny body was marked with bruises on his head, neck, arms and leg. In the report filed by DHS caseworker Jennifer Welton, two sentences seem to sum up the end of Spencer Corson’s short life.
“The parents showed very little emotion/reaction,†it reads. “It is not likely that the child will survive.â€
***
Spencer Corson was buried June 28 at Boone Memorial Gardens.
Dianna Rivera remembers the day. And she remembers what it was like to look over, past Spencer’s coffin, to where Stuart stood with Amanda. Even then, Dianna knew that Spencer’s death was no accident. She knew that he’d been killed, and she knew who’d done it.
“That was horrifying for us,†she says. “But we held our tongue because it was a sacred event. But it was hard. It was hell.â€
The police were involved by then, but Porter was still free, and that knowledge was bitter to Dianna. But worse still was the realization that her grandson had needed her to help him, to save him, and she couldn’t. That struggle had ended.
But for her, another had just begun.
“I couldn’t save my grandchild, and that will haunt me for the rest of my life,†she says. “No matter how hard I tried, no matter how hard I screamed and yelled. But I had to get that boy justice.â€
Over the next two years, Dianna Rivera were Spencer’s voice. Newspapers and television stations started to learn her name from the letters she sent, from the interviews she gave. Days after Spencer’s death, she was on TV describing Spencer’s hospital stays, saying his death was no accident.
In the aftermath, Dianna and Jessica Rivera and Bill and Ann Byers found each other, two families torn apart by one woman. Their attorney used the press coverage to buy time before they had to hand Hailey back over to Amanda. The Byerses asked Dianna to help them rescue her. She said she would. Dianna went to court for them, wrote affidavits told them Spencer’s story.
In the 94-degree heat of June 23, 2009, the anniversary of his death, Dianna and Jessica Rivera were in Nevada, sweat-soaked, holding signs and shouting, “Died at three, killer still free!†for whoever would listen. By then, the Polk County Medical Examiner had determined that Spencer Corson died of abusive head trauma as a result of an assault by another person. But Amanda Porter was still walking free.
“Now I kind of understand, but at the time it wasn’t fast enough,†Dianna Rivera says of the investigation. “And I was very angry. That’s why we rallied. Our whole purpose was to give Spencer a voice. And I didn’t care who I had to piss off or what rocks I had to kick over. I didn’t care.â€
Who knows what finally tipped the scales, but on January 22, 2010, more than 1 1/2 years after Spencer’s death, Amanda Porter was taken into custody without incident by the Nevada Police Department. She was charged with first-degree murder and child endangerment resulting in death.
On the MySpace page of Bill and Ann Byers, an article on the arrest appeared on their blog under their own headline, “The Monster is caged.â€
But for Dianna and her daughter, it wasn’t over yet. There was still the trial, and they knew that the only way Amanda could shift blame for Spencer’s death away from herself was to try to pin it on them.
The trial finally began in November 2011. Some of the attacks were personal – Porter’s attorney, Mike Adams, alleged that Spencer’s injuries were the result of an undiagnosed seizure disorder caused by fetal alcohol syndrome suffered because of Jessica Rivera’s drinking while she was pregnant. Stuart Corson took the stand and told the jury that he saw Jessica throw Spencer into the back seat of his car.
And then there were the photos. The bruises on Spencer’s skin. His skull opened to show the blood on his brain. His eyes removed to show retinal hemorrhages that couldn’t have occurred from anything other than a shearing force.
And bad as it was, Dianna says, they were glad to have gotten there at all.
“My family and I fought the whole time to get to that point,†she says. “We fought our hardest. So I was actually relieved. We’re here, we’re finally here. I wasn’t scared of the defense at all, because I knew they were grasping for straws. And I knew that the truth would prevail.â€
The jury returned with a verdict of guilty on both counts, a surprise to many, including the Riveras, whose best hope was a second-degree murder conviction. It was over. Amanda Porter is scheduled to be sentenced Friday, Jan. 13.
“It was amazing,†Dianna says. “It was like a dark cloud was lifted, and the sun was shining again.â€
***
Somewhere in Texas, a little girl lives with her grandparents.
She goes to first grade now, and she’s becoming very smart. She plays sports, and goes to church. She goes to the Boys and Girls Club, and this Christmas her grandparents took her to Disneyland.
It’s warmer there than here, more sunshine. In her backyard there’s a swing set and a trampoline and even a pool. She’s a normal little kid in most respects. She likes Spongebob and Barbie dolls.
She is happy there.
***
Somewhere in Boone, a gravestone marks where a little boy was laid to rest.
***
And in Ames, near a playground at Brookside Park, a small tree stands. Its branches are bare now, but in spring the leaves will return, and in better days the clouds will lift and the sun will shine on it again. It was planted by the city, in remembrance. A plaque stands in front of it. Beside it are two posts to help it grow up straight.
Around its trunk is a tattered blue ribbon, tied there some time ago by a woman who remembers him, who holds him in her heart still.
She can close her eyes and see him running through her house laughing, playing, hugging the dog.
She can see his smile.
Luke Jennett can be reached at (515) 663-6922 or ljennett@amestrib.com.
.
Tundratot
Muttering crone
Yeah, I don't think there is justice enough for the monster. But I am wondering what in the hell was going on with Stuart? So he worked all day. That is no excuse for his complete lack of participation in his child's life. He just turned it over the Amanda and never looked again. He showed up to take Spencer to the hospital, but then he's out of the picture again. WTF did he think was going on? Did he have no suspicions? He just supported the monster whatever she did.
shiroyama mama
Member
Sentenced to life!
http://www.amestrib.com/sections/news/ames-and-story-county/porter-sentenced-life-child-murder.html
And there's a much less flattering picture with the article; I guess she likes prison food.)
http://www.amestrib.com/sections/news/ames-and-story-county/porter-sentenced-life-child-murder.html
And there's a much less flattering picture with the article; I guess she likes prison food.)
Last edited:
Tundratot
Muttering crone
#34, above, posted by [MENTION=6840]Bill Byers[/MENTION], is quoted from this link http://www.amestrib.com/sections/news/ames-and-story-county/short-sad-life-spencer-corson.html . Also at the link are two pictures, which I'm posting.
Spencer Corson & Hailey Byers
Spencer Corson & Hailey Byers
badfish76
Trusted Member
Beautiful kids. So sad what they had to go thru.
I also want to applaud the Byers' because they are very invested in this and care a great deal about not only Hailey, but also Spencer and the fact that it cost him his life in order to save Hailey. I know that their son would be very proud of them. Heroism runs in that family. Dianna Rivera is also a hero in my book because she never stopped fighting to give her grandson a voice. It is a tragedy that Amanda used an unfounded accusation of abuse/neglect to cover up her actions and crimes against Spencer, but Diana and Jessica fought on.
I am glad that Hailey made it out and that Amanda got life in prison. I am also saddened that Spencer had to pay so dearly. I hope that he is with Hailey's daddy keeping him company. Fly free, little man.
I also want to applaud the Byers' because they are very invested in this and care a great deal about not only Hailey, but also Spencer and the fact that it cost him his life in order to save Hailey. I know that their son would be very proud of them. Heroism runs in that family. Dianna Rivera is also a hero in my book because she never stopped fighting to give her grandson a voice. It is a tragedy that Amanda used an unfounded accusation of abuse/neglect to cover up her actions and crimes against Spencer, but Diana and Jessica fought on.
I am glad that Hailey made it out and that Amanda got life in prison. I am also saddened that Spencer had to pay so dearly. I hope that he is with Hailey's daddy keeping him company. Fly free, little man.
Silvahalo
Bite My Seraphim Sass
@Bill Byers,
My heart goes out to your loss as it is so great. The loss of Casey and Justin then little Spencer, who's life was crossed with your family, touched you all then taken in such a tragic way. Your granddaughter Hailey's life will always be touched by his memory, his spirit will always remain. My hope is the coming years will bring many blessing and healing through the new memories made with Hailey as you watch her grow see her live life in part for Spencer.
Bless Hailey for her good fortune with good people. . .
and bless little Spencer who now forever graces the heavens.
May he never be forgotten.
My heart goes out to your loss as it is so great. The loss of Casey and Justin then little Spencer, who's life was crossed with your family, touched you all then taken in such a tragic way. Your granddaughter Hailey's life will always be touched by his memory, his spirit will always remain. My hope is the coming years will bring many blessing and healing through the new memories made with Hailey as you watch her grow see her live life in part for Spencer.
Bless Hailey for her good fortune with good people. . .
and bless little Spencer who now forever graces the heavens.
May he never be forgotten.
Last edited:
Bill Byers
New Member
Thank You......
Would just like to reply to all of the nice comments we received by the readers regarding our story. But we are not the Heroes here. We tried when we first got custody of Hailey in Sept 2007, but the reply from DHS to us was, " We are not a preventative agency." How correct they were on that comment. Perhaps we should have done more, but were already putting 100% of our energy into trying to fullfill the promise to our son to always keep Hailey safe. Perhaps someday the entire story can be told because we believe that there was an actual coverup to just sweep the whole thing under the rug in order to minimize the actions and non-actions concerning the DHS involvement. Will this ever happen? Not unless someone with a hell of alot of power reads this and initiates a full blown investigation into the DHS failure and makes the parties involved accountable for their actions. Then Spencer Corson will have his full justice.
My Sons Casey and Justin will make sure that Spencer is looked after and will never again be the subject of violence and hatred by another. And we will make sure that Hailey continues to live a full and happy live and she will know about all this when she reaches the age of 18 when she receives ours sons Military chest filled with everything from beginning to end.
But right now she is fine thanks to 4 yrs of play thearapy which has turned her into a normal, happy child who knows she is loved, knows she is special, and knows that she is protected. She just turned 7 Jan 16th. Thank you all again.....Bill and Ann Byers
Would just like to reply to all of the nice comments we received by the readers regarding our story. But we are not the Heroes here. We tried when we first got custody of Hailey in Sept 2007, but the reply from DHS to us was, " We are not a preventative agency." How correct they were on that comment. Perhaps we should have done more, but were already putting 100% of our energy into trying to fullfill the promise to our son to always keep Hailey safe. Perhaps someday the entire story can be told because we believe that there was an actual coverup to just sweep the whole thing under the rug in order to minimize the actions and non-actions concerning the DHS involvement. Will this ever happen? Not unless someone with a hell of alot of power reads this and initiates a full blown investigation into the DHS failure and makes the parties involved accountable for their actions. Then Spencer Corson will have his full justice.
My Sons Casey and Justin will make sure that Spencer is looked after and will never again be the subject of violence and hatred by another. And we will make sure that Hailey continues to live a full and happy live and she will know about all this when she reaches the age of 18 when she receives ours sons Military chest filled with everything from beginning to end.
But right now she is fine thanks to 4 yrs of play thearapy which has turned her into a normal, happy child who knows she is loved, knows she is special, and knows that she is protected. She just turned 7 Jan 16th. Thank you all again.....Bill and Ann Byers
Last edited:
badfish76
Trusted Member
My mind is made up about the guilt of the sea cow, myself, but I am not a juror. I agree that they came to the right sentence and you don't have to be a rocket scientist to know she beat that kid, HOWEVER it isn't that hard to STFU.
Because someone had to bleat about what was going on there is now a slim chance that Porter will get a new trial with an Anthony jury and walk out of there a free woman.
Good job, juror. I hope you sleep okay at night.
Because someone had to bleat about what was going on there is now a slim chance that Porter will get a new trial with an Anthony jury and walk out of there a free woman.
Good job, juror. I hope you sleep okay at night.
Share this page
Latest posts
-
-
-
WV Mom Charged In Death Of Teen Found 'Emaciated To A Skeletal State'- Latest: thatsmallgrl
-
