Summary
In People v. Bruen, 119 AD2d 685 the police entered the defendant's apartment without a warrant after the defendant brought her deceased child to the emergency department with bruising all over the child's body and the police learned that defendant's six year old twins were left alone in defendant's apartment.
Summary of this case from People v. DayeOpinion
April 14, 1986
Appeal from the County Court, Westchester County (Delaney, J.).
Judgments affirmed.
The defendants Bruen and Fisher brought the lifeless body of Bruen's four-year-old daughter to the Peekskill Community Hospital emergency room claiming that she had fallen down the stairs. When emergency room personnel observed numerous bruises all over the child's body the police were called. While separate interviews were conducted with each defendant, police officers were dispatched to Bruen's apartment house where she claimed a neighbor was taking care of her other two children. Upon learning that the six-year-old twins were not with the neighbor but were alone in Bruen's apartment, the officers had the neighbor coax the children into opening the door. As the neighbor dressed the children, the officers stood in the hallway just inside the door and observed a wooden paddle which the neighbor said she had seen Bruen use to hit her deceased child. The officers' seizure of the paddle, in plain view from where they stood inside the apartment, was not in violation of the defendants' 4th Amendment rights due to the emergency requiring their presence, i.e., to ensure the safety of Bruen's other children (see, People v. Mitchell, 39 N.Y.2d 173, 177-178, cert denied 426 U.S. 953; People v. Friedman, 95 A.D.2d 862).
We find no evidence that the defendants' statements to the police were involuntary and note that each written statement is preceded by a signed waiver of constitutional rights. The defendants' admissions of hitting the child, the medical evidence and the testimony of several neighbors and baby-sitters who witnessed acts of abuse by both defendants on the child, negated the defenses of accident and mistake and more than adequately established the requisite intent to inflict serious physical injury to support the verdicts.
We have examined the defendants' other contentions and find them to be without merit. Lazer, J.P., Niehoff, Kooper and Spatt, JJ., concur.