This is sad.....
(Court TV) Brian Stewart's 11-month-old son was in a Missouri hospital recovering from a respiratory ailment when he allegedly contracted HIV.
Prosecutors said it was Stewart a phlebotomist at a local hospital who injected his own son with HIV-tainted blood to avoid paying child support. They claimed Stewart, who was not married to the baby's mother, never wanted the child.
But Stewart pointed to a wealth of other possible suspects, including the baby's aunt and her boyfriend, both drug users who lived with the baby at one time. Another man who lived in the child's home was a convicted child sex offender. And the child's mother whose name was withheld to protect the baby's anonymity is also ill, suffering from depression and symptoms consistent with Munchausen-by-proxy syndrome, a form of abuse in which an individual intentionally makes another sick to meet their own psychological needs.
Stewart, who is now 35, was arrested six years later for first-degree assault. He faced up to life in prison if convicted by a St. Charles County jury.
The Child
Just months after Brian Stewart began dating "Jennifer," in January 1990, she became pregnant with his child. Though Stewart didn't want her to have the baby, their son was born 13 months later.
The two never married, and Stewart continued to deny paternity for years. After the couple split, he refused to pay child support. A paternity suit later led to the determination that Stewart was indeed the baby's father, and he was ordered to pay support.
The baby was being treated for respiratory problems at St. Joseph's Medical Center-West in Lake St. Louis, where Stewart visited his son on Feb. 6, 1992.
Stewart, who worked as a phlebotomist one who draws blood for testing at another hospital, was seen carrying a lab coat into the child's room. The child's mother left the two alone for about 20 minutes. When she returned, the door was closed and the child was screaming and crying, she said.
It was during the mother's absence that Stewart allegedly injected his son with HIV-tainted blood, prosecutors contended.
The child was supposed to be released from the hospital that day, but within two hours of Stewart's visit, the baby took a turn for the worse and was transported to another area hospital.
For the next five years, the child's illnesses puzzled doctors who treated and tested him for a number of ailments. But it was not until May 17, 1996, when he was admitted to Children's Hospital in St. Louis with an unknown disease that he was finally tested for HIV. On May 25, 1996, he was diagnosed with advanced stages of AIDS.
During the next two years, investigators from the St. Charles County Sheriff's Department and the Missouri Department of Health, together with the child's treating physicians, tried to determine how he became infected.
There was no evidence the child had been sexually abused, nor had he ever had a lawful blood transfusion, the two primary ways in which HIV is transmitted.
On July 7, 1997, the paternity suit was settled and Stewart was ordered to pay $267 per month plus $25 per month back pay.
The child, who is now 11, is healthy enough to attend school but requires several daily medications.
The State's Case
Led by prosecutors Ross W. Buehler and James G. Gregory, the state contended that their investigation revealed the child had not been exposed to anyone who tested positive for HIV. According to at least one report, at least 26 people who had contact with the child, including his parents, were tested for HIV, and all those tests came back negative.
The child's mother recalled Stewart telling her she would never receive child support payments from him because the boy would not live past the age of 5. He also allegedly told her not to bother seeking child support from him because "the child would not live for very long anyway." She reported seeing Stewart possessing syringes and what appeared to be blood products in the home.
An ex-girlfriend whom Stewart dated in 1996 testified during a preliminary hearing before the trial that Stewart told her his son had AIDS. But that revelation, she said, came two weeks before Stewart was notified by authorities of his son's illness.
Prosecutors also argue that because of his job as a phlebotomist, Stewart had access to syringes and other blood product supplies. More importantly, he would draw HIV-tainted blood from patients as a part of his job at Barnes-Jewish Health System in St. Louis, where he worked from 1991 to 1993. They theorized that Stewart drew an extra vial of tainted blood, smuggled it out of the hospital where he worked and into the hospital where his son was a patient.
The Defense's Case
Defense lawyers Joseph I. Murphy, Ronald J. Brockmeyer and Thomas Fagan contended that others had contact with the boy at home and in the hospital and could have transmitted the deadly disease. The boy's aunt, Veronica Johnson, and her boyfriend, both drug users, lived with the child at some point, as did convicted child sex offender and admitted drug user Larry Lee Roper.
Roper was sentenced to 10 years in prison for sodomizing a young boy in Jefferson City, Mo. At the time of that conviction, he was already on probation for sodomizing other children in Steelville, Mo. The defense argued that Roper also admitted to using heroin, cocaine, amphetamines, Valium and marijuana.
Convicted sex offenders are tested for HIV before entering prison, however, and Roper tested negative in 1995. Johnson and her boyfriend also tested negative for HIV.
But the defense implied that other, unidentified intravenous drug users who could have had contact with the child who were HIV positive.
The defense also said that the child's mother shows signs of Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy, in which a parent inflicts harm on a child for attention or sympathy. They contended that under his mother's care, the baby had been treated for a burn, a head laceration and broken bones and that he suffered respiratory problems since he was an infant.
A Troubled Life
Stewart was born Brian Eugene Simion in Illinois to a career Army father, whose work required the family to move often.
His parents divorced when he was 4. Though his mother had obtained a court order requiring his father to pay $100 in monthly child support, she never saw the money. Nine years later, she obtained another order for back payments, but it is unclear whether she ever received the money under the support order.
Eventually, the family moved back to Stewart's hometown of Alton, Ill., where he attended high school and later received certification in phlembotomy from St. Louis Community College. He was also a member of the Naval Reserves and served active duty at Great Lakes Naval Base Hospital in Chicago in late 1992.
But Stewart was described as a drifter who moved from town to town, and from woman to woman. He also has a record of abuse, assault and theft in at least two cases in St. Louis County court.
In 1993, Stewart met registered nurse Elizabeth Stolte, whom he married that July. In November 1995, he was charged with abusing her, and they divorced the following year. At Stewart's preliminary hearing last May, Stolte reportedly testified that Stewart threatened to kill her.
Stewart was charged in 1996 with stealing a box of Vivarin from a store and assaulting a store employee. He pleaded guilty to misdemeanor assault, and the theft charge was dropped. Stewart was sentenced to two years' probation on condition that he serve 10 days in jail, complete 40 hours of community service, stay away from the store and enter an "aggressive offenders" program.
At the time of his arrest for the alleged injection of his son, Stewart was living in Columbia, Ill. He was arrested the evening of Tuesday, April 22, 1998, in the parking lot of an outpatient facility where he worked as a lab assistant at St. Louis University Medical Center. The hospital placed him on administrative leave.
The Stakes
Stewart was charged with one count of first-degree assault, a class A felony. The maximum sentence is life in prison with parole eligibility after 15 years, or 10 to 30 years in prison. If the child had died before trial, the charges could have been upgraded to murder.
The Verdict
A jury found Brian Stewart guilty of first-degree assault on Dec. 7, 1998.
Judge Ellsworth Cundiff sentenced him to life in prison on Jan. 8, 1999. He told Stewart that when he dies he is going to "burn in hell from here to eternity."
Stewart appealed his conviction, but it was denied.
His son, now 11, is still alive and is doing well with treatments for full-blown AIDS.
http://www.courttv.com/trials/taped/...ackground.html
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