A St. Cloud man was found guilty of first-degree murder and child abuse in the killing of his infant son.
Larry Perry, 33, now faces the death penalty.
He admitted guilt to a manslaughter charge in the 2013 death of his nearly 3-month-old son, Ayden Perry. But prosecutors argued that the killing was murder, and jurors agreed.
The jury will return Monday for the penalty phase of the trial, in which they will have to decide whether Perry should be sentenced to death or life in prison. They will have to vote unanimously in favor of his execution in order for him to go to death row.
Perry’s family and the child’s mother did not attend the trial.
“I honestly didn’t want anybody to come,” he told Circuit Judge Jon Morgan at the end of the trial. “… I didn’t wanna put anybody through this.”
Perry was home alone with Ayden the evening of Feb. 13, 2013, when the child started crying. The baby’s mother, Kathy Barnes, was arrested on a drug trafficking charge two weeks earlier and was still in jail. She was the one who usually calmed Ayden down when he cried, Perry told police.
To stop Ayden from crying, Perry gave him a new bottle, moved him to another room in the apartment, and turned on the vacuum cleaner, which in the past helped calm him down. He got frustrated and yelled at the child to quiet down, he later told police.
But Ayden kept sobbing.
Perry told police he grabbed the child and threw him against a bedroom wall two or three times, so the back of his head slammed into the wall. Then he put him on the bed and and tried to twist his neck.
Ayden stopped crying. But Perry picked him up and brought the child into the apartment’s living room, dropped him onto the floor and stomped on his face and chest. Then he called 911 and asked for help.
Ayden had a severely fractured skull, bruising on his face and chest and broken ribs. His cheek had bruises that looked like the pattern on the sole of the house slipper Perry was wearing.
Defense attorney Frank Bankowitz argued that Perry snapped under the pressure of having to care for the child alone. Perry said as much when he called 911, the lawyer said.
“That’s not a murderer, that’s a person who comes to their senses and realizes, oh my God, what have I done?” Bankowitz said.
Perry, who spent much of the trial looking down at the defense table or floor, stood to hear the verdict. His head dropped when the courtroom clerk said he was guilty.