Ten first responders, one after another, and only two of them cross-examined. East Idaho News stamps the opening of the session at 09:19, with Judge William Sullivan instructing the jurors about staying clear of coverage of the case, and the Commonwealth then spent the whole morning putting the police officers, firefighters and paramedics who reached the Duxbury house on the night of January 24, 2023 in front of the jury in roughly the order they had arrived there. East Idaho News keeps a running count of the trial's witnesses and numbers this day's ten as the fourth through the thirteenth. Court ended at about noon.
Duxbury Officer Stephen Hall went first, called between 09:27 and 09:31 depending on the blog. He came through the gate at the side of the house and followed a man's voice from the back yard, where he found Patrick Clancy upset and the defendant on the ground with her head toward the house. She had cuts to both wrists and to her neck; none of them were actively bleeding, and on his training he did not think they needed first aid. She moved in and out of consciousness, could not speak, and made sounds he took for pain. When more officers arrived Patrick Clancy went inside to look for the children; Hall heard him say he could not wake them, then heard a scream, and ran in. In a back basement room set up as a gym he found a child on his back, shirtless in a diaper, bluish-purple, with an exercise band beside him — Dawson. He and Officer Brian Josephine carried the boy out to the EMTs and went back down, where Hall found two more children on the floor, motionless, with paramedics working on them; he was sent to fetch a heart monitor. Outside again he looked up at an open second-floor window with blood around the frame and on the shingles, and no screen on the ground. Photographs of the basement were put in front of the jury as he testified. The Boston Globe describes him speaking haltingly and taking off his glasses to wipe his eyes. Kevin Reddington did not cross-examine him; he thanked him for his incredible service and sat down.
Josephine, working an overtime shift, reached the house in three or four minutes. He found Patrick Clancy standing over the defendant with a phone in his hand, apparently trying to talk to her, and then walking past him toward the house. The defendant mumbled but did not speak; the cuts he saw were bleeding, but not enough to need pressure or a tourniquet. He heard screaming, ran to the basement with another officer and found Patrick Clancy in a back room, who looked up and screamed that she had killed the children. He described Dawson in detail — white-gray face, blue lips, bloodshot eyes, red marks on the neck — picked him up chest to chest and ran him out through the kitchen to the ambulance. Back in the basement two firefighters were already working on Cora and Callan; he gave Cora chest compressions while another officer worked a bag valve mask, and said it felt like forever. Callan was carried out first because a faint pulse had been found on him. Upstairs Josephine found Patrick Clancy frantic and in shock, and an ambulance was called for him too. Reddington told him he was sorry, he had no questions.
At about 10:11 Reddington objected as the Commonwealth moved to call its next first responder. Sullivan sent the jury out and took counsel to sidebar; East Idaho News calls it a renewed objection. No outlet reports the ground of the objection or any ruling on it. Court came back at about 10:33.
The rest of the morning belonged to the fire service. Captain PJ Hussey, a paramedic and shift commander seventeen years in the department, was in the back yard with the defendant and two paramedics when he heard the screaming; through a basement window he saw Patrick Clancy lift a child whose head was blue and unwrap something from around it, a circular motion Hussey demonstrated for the jury. He put out an all-call for every Duxbury firefighter and asked for mutual aid and more ambulances. Until the children were found every paramedic on scene had been working on the defendant; afterwards one stayed with her and three went to the children, and someone was later assigned to Patrick Clancy. It turned very chaotic very quickly, he said, and the phrase led the day's coverage. Loring "Chuck" Nudd, an EMT, had backed the ambulance into the driveway and received Dawson into it: he gave CPR, hooked up a monitor that showed no heartbeat, sent the monitor down to the basement for the other two children and drove the boy to the hospital. Captain Keith Nette came in from off duty in his own truck, took over Dawson's treatment in the back of that ambulance — IV, attempted intubation, an intraosseous line drilled above the knee for epinephrine, continuing CPR — and never got a pulse back. He described dark red marks around the boy's neck, and the Globe reports him saying Patrick Clancy appeared visibly upset in the emergency room after the children were pronounced dead.
Patrick Dwyer and Jennifer Stratton had arrived together and gone down to the basement, where Dwyer saw two children on the ground and their father sitting on the couch beside them. Dwyer took Cora and Stratton took Callan. Cora had burst blood vessels around her eyes, blood around her mouth and bluish, pale skin, and was not breathing; Dwyer rode with her and shocked her once with a defibrillator without recovering a pulse. Stratton found deep strangulation marks around the entire circumference of Callan's neck, cut away his pajama jumper and gave chest compressions with her thumbs because of his size — and it was that description the defense objected to, the one contested evidentiary moment of the day. Sullivan let her answer. An attempt at an intraosseous line in the baby's leg failed. She carried him out in her arms and rode with him to the hospital, and he never breathed on his own.
Then the case turned to the defendant's own injuries, and so did the defense. Robert Costanzo, a Pembroke paramedic on mutual aid, found her on a backboard in a cervical collar, wrists already bandaged with no blood seeping through and superficial cuts around her collar with no active bleed, moaning but not speaking. Her pupils were constricted and she was unresponsive, so on the way to South Shore Hospital he gave her two milligrams of Narcan for a possible opioid overdose. She became more agitated — reaching and grabbing more than before — but never fully woke. On the first cross-examination of the day Reddington established that the Narcan had produced no real response, that reaching and grabbing is also consistent with a head injury, that the scene was dark, and that Costanzo had not known she had a burst fracture of the cervical spine, fractured ribs and was hemorrhaging. On redirect the Commonwealth put the other side of it: seven minutes with her outside in the dark without even a flashlight, then eighteen minutes in a lit ambulance, and in all that time no blood pooling around her neck and none flowing from it.
Daniel Dougherty, who had put the collar on her and bandaged her wrists at the scene, gave the Commonwealth the same picture on direct: dried blood on the neck, the wound seeming somewhat superficial because there was no active bleed, nothing bleeding from the wrists either, the patient not totally responsive but reacting to painful stimuli and coming round somewhat as they moved her. He did not ride with her; he went to Dawson's ambulance and worked the bag valve mask. Reddington's cross of him is the defense's answer to the whole superficial-wounds line. He called the night wicked cold, established that she had been lying on the ground for some time and that hypothermia can restrict blood flow, and asked whether Dougherty could say what effect, if any, hypothermia had had on whether blood seeped through the wrist bandages or through the openings of the neck brace. Dougherty said he could not. Assistant District Attorney Jennifer Sprague came back with the hospital record: the wrist wounds were not sutured until the following day and the neck wound was never sutured at all. Dougherty said he had not been given that information afterward, and said the same when asked about the neck. The Globe reports responders testifying on redirect that the ambulance was well lit and the hospital heated and that the wounds still did not bleed heavily.
Officer Vincent Cahill closed the day. He found Patrick Clancy in the basement, screaming, and was directed to the left-hand side, where two children lay; he checked Cora for a pulse and found none, and checked Callan. He moved a large futon and an ottoman out of the way for the arriving paramedics, helped with CPR and gave Cora rescue breaths with a bag valve mask, and was then put on the door to log who came in and out of the scene. At about 12:06 Sullivan excused the jurors for the rest of the day, telling them there were a couple of issues to hammer out and that rather than have them wait he would send them home. Why the day ended is the one thing the coverage does not agree on. The Globe says the judge was vague about it. Boston 25 and East Idaho News record him telling the jurors the trial was ahead of schedule. CBS Boston's Kristina Rex reported that the reason was that the Commonwealth had run out of witnesses. CNN notes that the schedule the judge himself gave before testimony began that morning had the day running its full length. Friday was to be the jury view, with the jurors able to walk the property and the lawyers expected to point out significant features, and testimony afterwards.
