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A Bexar County jury began deliberating Tuesday morning in the emotional case of Marquita Johnson and Qwalion Busby, two Converse-area parents accused of allowing their 7-month-old baby to die in December 2015 from a massive bacterial blood infection.
The parents did not take their son, Naeem Busby, to a medical doctor during his life. If convicted of serious bodily injury to a child by omission, a first degree felony, the couple could be sent to prison for 5 to 99 years.
Busby, 36, has been an oil field truck driver, while Johnson, 33, has a bachelor’s degree from Tarleton State and has been a pharmacy technician and parole officer.
In closing arguments, Johnson’s attorneys, Demetrio Duarte and Linda Molina, reminded jurors they never heard from a single witness who could definitively say the child’s medical emergency began weeks before his death.
“Naeem’s auto-immune deficiency spread through his little body like wildfire,” Molina said. “And yet every state’s witness agrees he could have been asymptomatic. … Not one state’s witness could give you a timeline (for when critical symptoms emerged) and not one could assure you his life could have been saved.
“When you are deciding a first degree felony, you should demand more,” she said.
Prosecutors Kristina Escalona and Melissa Saenz, reciting a litany of skin, hair, weight and respiratory problems Naeem exhibited at death, said “common sense” would have alerted any caring parent to his medical crisis.
“That baby had sepsis,” Escalona told the jury. “How inconsolable he must have been. How long he must have cried. No wonder he was so dehydrated.”
bselcraig@express-news.net
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