Jury in baby death trial review mother's videotaped police interview

Jurors in the murder trial of Jennifer Long spent much of Wednesday reviewing video recordings of detectives’ questioning her after her 18-month-old adopted daughter was found to be brain dead from a head injury.

The recordings showed Long for hours denied slamming the crying child down on a changing table, breaking the wooden surface.

As detectives asked how the girl, Alexis, was injured, Long repeatedly said neither she nor her husband knew.

“I don’t know. Honest, I don’t know. We’re both baffled,” she said.

She said she was about to change the child’s diaper when the baby abruptly slumped over and vomited.

Police Sgt. Matt Blackstock wasn’t buying it. The girl’s head trauma was too severe for nothing to have happened, he said: “It’s like being in a head-on car wreck, Jennifer,” he told her.

“I told you what happened,” she said. “I can’t say nothing else.”

Blackstock also asked about the girl’s being bruised “from head to toe.”

“She falls a lot from walking, bumping into things,” Long said.

Another detective, John Bailey, found that unbelievable: “Kids fall, but they don’t end up with that kind of bruising,” he told Long.

Questioned separately in another room, Long’s husband Timothy Long told officers he heard the child crying while he was outside the house, then the crying stopped after he heard a loud noise from inside.

When he went back in, he was headed for the bathroom when he met his wife in the hall.

“Did you hear a noise?” he asked her.

“There’s something wrong with Alexis,” she told him.

The girl was injured on Jan. 29, 2012, and rushed from Columbus to a trauma center in Atlanta, hhere she died the next day after her life-support was disconnected.

After nearly four hours of police questioning, Jennifer Long told detectives she hadn’t realized she’d thrown Alexis onto the table with such force.

Defense attorney Tim Flournoy said his client was exhausted from lack of sleep, and finally just told police what they wanted to hear.

Later video recordings showed the husband talking to his wife in the interview room.

“I still love you,” he told her. “I know you didn’t do it on purpose.”

The couple since has separated.

Jennifer Long’s trial resumes this morning before Judge Ron Mullins on the Columbus Government Center’s ninth floor.

This story was originally published December 9, 2015 at 5:21 PM with the headline "Jury in baby death trial review mother's videotaped police interview."