A jury is to determine whether Lindsay Clancy is criminally responsible for killing her three children in 2023 in Duxbury, Massachusetts. She was being treated for postpartum mental health issues when she killed the children: Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, who was 8 months old. Plymouth County Superior Court Judge William Sullivan is presiding over the jury trial, which began on July 27 and is expected to last six to eight weeks.
Curated by: Meghann Cuniff (223 videos)
This case involves serious mental health issues and could distress people. If you or someone you know needs help, you can call or text 988 to speak to a trained crisis counselor. You also can visit 988lifeline.org or dial 800-273-8255 [TALK]. The first court-recognized expert to testify in Lindsay Clancy's defense in her murder trial was Michael Vulfovich, an emergency medicine doctor at Newton Wellesley Hospital in Massachusetts. At defense attorney Kevin Reddington's request, Vulfovich reviewed photos of the inside of Clancy's home after she killed her children and attempted suicide, and he reviewed her hospital records. He testified today (Monday, August 17, day 14) as the last witness of the day. 03:15 "I did three years of residency, and this is my 13th year as a full time attendant." 04:09 "You asked me to review the photos from the crime scene, and then the emergency medical records from South Shore Hospital, Brigham and Women's Hospital, and then the records from her hospital stay at Brigham and Women's Hospital." 04:32 "And can you tell the jurors what what treatment she received at the South Shore Hospital briefly?" "So, she arrived with a GCS of 10, meaning she was not really very responsive." 05:19 "It tells us that she was not very responsive on arrival. It sounds like she was not speaking intelligibly, and the doctors at South Shore Hospital were concerned about her ability to maintain her own airway and made the decision to intubate her, which means putting a breathing tube down her throat into her lungs and placing her on a ventilator and sedating her." 05:46 " in her case, her core body temperature was, I believe, 82.1 degrees, which would put her into severe hypothermia." 06:53 "Bilateral laceration, both to her left wrist and to her right wrist, and then multiple superficial lacerations as well, and then she also had multiple superficial lacerations to both sides of her neck, the front of her neck, and two deeper lacerations to the sides of her neck." 08:24 "Well, when you looked at the injuries, did you make a determination that they appeared to have some impact on the human 'body of Ms. Clancy?" "Yes." "What was that?" "They were consistent with self-injurious behavior. The intent I can't gage." 09:57 "She also had multiple fraction in her cervical spine, which are the vertebrae that make up her neck, including what's called a burst fracture of C1, and then other fractures of C4. She also had fractures of multiple levels of the thoracic spine. I believe she had multiple transverse process fractures on both the right and left." 10:20 "Transverse processes are lateral projections, basically projections that go sideways off of the bone that allow the ribs to articulate, connect with the spine, and they also allow muscles to connect, and they help support the basically overall ring structure of the spinal canal." 11:14 "Did she suffer a particular event that night that you recall from looking at the records?" "She did shortly after arriving in the surgical ICU, it sounds like they were moving her, and when they moved her, they noticed that her blood pressure dropped, her pulse became faint, and subsequently she actually suffered a complete cardiac arrest, and required two rounds of cardiopulmonary resuscitation with compressions and medications before she was able to be revived." 11:49 "Yes, they placed chest tubes, which are basically plastic tubes that go into the chest cavity on both sides, and had about 300 cc's of blood come out from each side, and there was also noted to be significant hemorrhage around the spine and into the mediastinum, which is the portion of the chest that houses a lot of the organs, like your esophagus, your trachea, blood vessels, that kind of thing." 12:25 "If you have a fracture that affects the spinal cord above a certain level, typically above the third cervical vertebrae, it basically removes your ability to initiate breathing on your own. Your third, fourth, and fifth cervical vertebrae, the nerves that lead from there are the ones that are responsible for telling your diaphragm to go up and down and help you breathe. And so, if you lose the ability to send that signal down to your diaphragm, you lose the ability to breathe." 12:55 "Now, as it relates to your review of the medical records and review of the history. Are you aware of the mechanism of the injuries that she suffered that you just described for the jury?" "I am." "Tell us what that was, to your knowledge." "That she went out of her second-story window."