Jury finds father guilty of killing girl

Kathy Garrymore gasped loudly, then began to sob in the arms of family members Friday as a jury declared her husband, Jason Lucas Garrymore, guilty of murdering her little girl.

Jason Garrymore dropped his head to the defendant's table and didn't move for several minutes.

The jury was polled one final time, asked if the verdict read in court was the one each of the seven women and five men agreed to. And each juror answered with a resolute "Yes." It had taken them only an hour and a half to reach their decision to convict Garrymore, 35, of deliberate homicide.

Several of the city and county employees who took a break from work to see the verdict read wiped tears from their eyes.

"If there is truly justice," Kathy Garrymore said, "Š it has just been served."

Asked if she thought her daughter, Tylin Paige Garrymore, would be happy, she said, "Tylin is happy for sure. She needed this, too, and I wouldn't be any kind of mother if I hadn't stood up for her."

Kathy Garrymore said during her own testimony at trial that she was reliving the little girl's death, reliving the realization that the man she loved had utterly betrayed both her and her child.

Garrymore's trial lasted just 1 1/2 days, taken up mostly by testimony from witnesses for the prosecution. He did not take the stand, and no witnesses spoke on his behalf.

He will be sentenced in April.

Tylin died Jan. 3, 2003, exactly two weeks before her second birthday.

She had spent the night before in the care of her daddy, Jason Garrymore, the man who had asked when she was 8 months old to have his name put on her birth certificate. Kathy worked the graveyard shift at a casino that night, arriving home sometime around 6:30 a.m. to find her husband and sick child "camping out" on blankets on the living room floor.

Kathy testified that she thought Tylin had the flu and wanted to take her to the hospital. Jason said no, that she was overreacting, that he would leave if she did. She went to bed and was kicked awake a few hours later. Tylin was limp in Jason's arms, and he said they had to get to the hospital. Tylin was pronounced dead within the hour.

State Medical Examiner Gary Dale said Tylin bled to death after suffering a tear in her mesentery, a membrane that enfolds the small intestine and attaches it to the back of the abdominal wall. She also had signs of recent head trauma and more than 40 bruises covering her head, back, arms and abdomen.

Dale said Tylin's vomiting and listlessness - what her mother thought was the flu - could easily be explained by the brain injuries and shock from internal blood loss.

Photos of Tylin's injuries showed the 18 distinct, finger-shaped bruises on her belly - a very difficult place to bruise on a child because it is so soft. There were also photos of her black eye, big bruises on each side of her forehead and under her chin, as well as a photo of the internal injuries Dale found during the autopsy.

Kathy Garrymore left the courtroom Thursday when the jury saw the pictures.

She still has never seen the extent of Tylin's injuries. Instead, she kept a photo of a giggling, impish little blonde tucked inside her clothes throughout the trial, a reminder of why she was there.

But the jury saw. And they saw again Friday, as Deputy County attorneys Suzy Boylan-Moore and Andrew Paul made their final arguments for Jason Garrymore's guilt.

"Tylin can't tell us what happened, but her body left a record," Paul said.

Throughout the trial, witnesses talked about the excuses Jason Garrymore gave for Tylin's bruises. She fell and hit her head on the potty. The dog knocked her over. They were playing too rough. He stumbled while he was carrying her. She scratched her eye with a hanger. He rolled over to push himself up while they were lying on the floor, and his hand sunk into her belly. She poured pepper in her eye. She fell backward while she was sitting on the toilet.

None of those things, several medical witnesses said, could explain Tylin's death.

Boylan-Moore held up a photo of a healthy, happy Tylin and another taken during her autopsy.

"How on earth does all of that happen by accident?" she asked the jury. "How does a baby go from this to this in a few short hours by accident?"

And then there was the detention officer who testified she'd heard Garrymore tell another inmate, "I'm in for killing my daughter with my own hand, but I didn't mean to take it that far."

But Public Defender Margaret Borg said Garrymore would never have hurt Tylin.

"Why would this man kill the daughter that he loved and break up the family?" she asked. She pointed to the evidence, all circumstantial, and said it just didn't add up.

"There is no why," Borg said. "There is no reason that this man would ever have killed his daughter."

Boylan-Moore and Paul agreed that they didn't have an answer why. But Tylin's fatal injury couldn't have happened except by a forceful, purposeful blow. And Jason Garrymore was the only one with Tylin the night before she died. He was the one with all the excuses.

Said Boylan-Moore: "If children can die as easily as the defendant would have you believe, we would have a lot more dead children."

Reporter Ericka Schenck Smith can be reached at 523-5259 or at esmith@missoulian.com.

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