Lindsay Clancy broke down in court Friday as an emergency room doctor recounted efforts to save her eight-month-old son on the night she strangled her baby and two other young children before trying to kill herself.
Benjamin Kaufman, an emergency medicine doctor, testified during Clancy’s triple murder trial that he was on the medical team who treated her infant son, Callan, on Jan. 24, 2023 at Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital in Plymouth.
The two other children, Cora, 5, and Dawson, 3, died on the night Duxbury first responders found them unconscious at the home of 47 Summer St., but Callan had a faint pulse and was pronounced dead at Boston Children’s Hospital, where he was transferred by Beth Israel, a few days later.
Clancy shook, covered her face with her hands, and appeared to be sobbing as Kaufman testified that her baby regained a heartbeat about 10 minutes after arriving at the emergency room, and described the futile efforts to revive him.
“The first thing that we do is give a dose of epinephrine, and in this case, you can look directly at the heart with an ultrasound,” Kaufman said. “His heart started beating after we were able to give that dose. At that point, we continued compressions, continued giving him breaths through the breathing tube.
“Plymouth Hospital doesn’t have pediatrics or the ability to care for that level of pediatric patients. So we’re on the phone with Boston Children’s Hospital, making preparations basically to get him to the more definitive care,” Kaufman added.
Kaufman said that while Callan was able to regain a pulse, he never regained the ability to breathe on his own or exhibit any brain function while at Beth Israel. He said the baby scored lowest on the 3-15 Glasgow Coma Scale, a clinical tool used to measure a person’s level of consciousness.
“There’s different variations for pediatrics, but he scored the lowest, which is basically you’re in a coma or have no brain response, during the entire time that he was in my care,” Kaufman said. “At no point in time during his care did he have any brain function that was evident on my exam.”
Kaufman was one of two doctors to take the stand Friday, which featured just over an hour of testimony after jurors spent most of their day on a rare site visit.
Jurors walked through the Duxbury home where Clancy strangled her three children, and also saw the yard where she was found after jumping from a second-story window, a suicide attempt that followed the killings. The visit took about 40 minutes.
Clancy did not visit the home, which she hasn’t seen since the day she killed her kids.
Clancy is not disputing that she did the killings. Instead, her attorney Kevin Reddington is arguing that she was suffering from postpartum psychosis and isn’t criminally responsible for the deaths.
As heard in a 911 call played in court Wednesday, her then-husband Patrick Clancy called the police when he came home on January 24, 2023, to find his wife on the ground in their backyard after jumping out of a second story window.
Patrick Clancy previously testified that he’d found the children unresponsive with exercise bands tied around their neck, after going inside to check on them.
Lindsay Clancy sat in the courtroom in her wheelchair. The fall paralyzed her.
Another emergency physician, Mark Joseph Tenerowicz, took the stand Friday to describe unsuccessful attempts to revive Clancy’s other son, Dawson, who was 3.
“He arrived by fire in an ambulance,” Tenerowicz said. “I was told that he reportedly had been strangled, and he was found without a pulse and not breathing.”
Tenerowicz said Dawson had a breathing tube attached when he arrived at Beth Israel, and emergency medical personnel had placed a device into the bone of his leg to give him intravenous fluids and medicine.
“CPR was in progress. He was not breathing on his own, and he had no pulse responding,” Tenerowicz said, adding that he observed ruptured blood vessels on the boy’s face and old bruises on his legs.
The doctor said Dawson was treated for about 40 minutes, but the boy never gained a pulse nor the ability to breathe on his own, and eventually had to come to the stark conclusion that there was no way to save him.
“It did not look like his heart would ever start again,” Tenerowicz said.
He pronounced Dawson dead at 7:28 p.m. The 911 call came in at 6:11 p.m.
Jurors were sent home for the weekend around 1:30 p.m. Friday. The Clancy murder trial will resume Monday at 9 a.m.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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