WHITE RIVER JUNCTION — Tyler Pollender-Savery stood shackled at a defense table Monday in court to face a murder charge as the mother of the infant he is accused of killing looked on from the first row of seats directly behind the prosecutor.
The 23-year-old Ludlow man denied a charge of second-degree murder in Windsor County criminal court in White River Junction late Monday afternoon in the death of 11-month-old Karsen Rickert. He was ordered held without bail.
Police have been investigating the infant’s death since January, when the baby was declared dead at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, New Hampshire.
According to records, the infant’s death was ruled a homicide, with the cause of death determined to be asphyxiation from strangulation or smothering.
Two people were in the residence in Ludlow on Route 100 South with Karsen when medical personnel and police were called there on the morning of Jan. 11 for a report of an unresponsive child: the infant’s mother, Abigail Wood, and her boyfriend at the time, Pollender-Savery.
Both denied harming the child, according to an affidavit accompanying a search warrant obtained by police earlier in the investigation. The two split up shortly after the baby’s death, court records stated.
Now, 11 months into the probe, Pollender-Savery has been charged in the infant’s killing.
“I can tell you that the investigation has consisted of many distinct phases and really the most recent phase was the collection of telephone and social media evidence,” Windsor County State’s Attorney David Cahill told reporters prior to Pollender-Savery’s arraignment Monday.
“In any case where there are three people in a house, one’s dead and two are remaining, the police need to take a hard look at both,” the prosecutor said. “That’s what they did in this case and that’s why it took as long as it did, because they did take a hard long at both.”
Cahill, in arguing in court to hold Pollender-Savery without bail pending trial, said the murder suspect was the last person seen leaving Karsen’s room just minutes before 911 was called to the apartment he shared with Wood and the infant.
“The defendant was jealous that Abby Wood was showing renewed romantic interest in Karsen’s biological father,” Cahill said.
Steven Howard, a Rutland attorney representing Pollender-Savery, countered in court Monday that there was no need to hold his client without bail. He said Pollender-Savery was a lifelong Vermonter with no criminal record and was not a risk to flee.
Howard said his client knew he was under investigation in the infant’s death for nearly a year and did not leave the region.
“This case basically is a ‘he said, she said’,” the defense attorney told Judge Elizabeth Mann. “It relies a great deal on (Wood’s) statements and her assertions.”
Howard added, “We don’t have anything that shows that this is the only possible person who could have done it.”
Judge Mann agreed to the prosecutor’s request to hold Pollender-Savery behind bars without bail, at least for now.
“This is a not a ‘he-said, she-said’ situation,” the judge said from the bench after taking a brief break to review a police affidavit filed in the case in support of the second-degree murder charge against Pollender-Savery.
“In fact,” the judge added, “the state’s case rests on the statements of both Ms. Wood and the defendant, buttressed by the medical examiner’’ report, and extensive investigation by state police that include collateral statements, including a number of statements made by the defendant to other people over the course of the last 11 months.”
According to the affidavit filed in court Monday by Vermont State Police Detective Sgt. Michael Dion, around 7:30 a.m. on Jan. 11 a call came from the home in Ludlow that Pollander-Savery shared with Wood at that time.
“My baby’s not breathing,” the man told the 911 dispatcher over the phone, adding, “Please hurry,” before hanging up, the affidavit stated.
Minutes later, a return call made by the dispatcher was picked up by a man who said, “Hello, fucking hurry up please, I don’t know what you are doing but my kid is unconscious,” according to the affidavit.
The dispatcher asked about CPR, the filing stated, and the man responded, “Yes, my girlfriend is a nurse, she’s in there right now, it’s not doing anything.”
Then police arrived at the scene, the affidavit stated.
Karsen was taken to Springfield Hospital, and then flown by helicopter to Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, New Hampshire, where he was later pronounced dead, according to authorities.
The EMT who responded to the baby told police she saw “ligature marks” on the infant’s neck and “what appeared to be a couple of small cuts,” as well as a bruise on one of the baby’s arms.
The next day, Jan. 12, Dr. Jennie Duval, New Hampshire’s medical examiner, performed an autopsy on the infant. Upon completion, she reported that no cause of death could be immediately determined.
The autopsy took place in New Hampshire because that is where the infant was pronounced dead.
In May, the detective wrote in a court filing in support of a search warrant in the case, he received the final autopsy report from the medical examiner in New Hampshire. The doctor had ruled the manner of death as a homicide, and the cause “asphyxia due to strangulation and/or smothering.”
Two days later, the detective wrote, on May 7, police again interviewed Wood.
Just prior to waking up that morning, Wood said, she saw Pollender-Savery walking over the gate coming out of Karsen’s room, the affidavit stated.
She then went to the bathroom and straight into Karsen’s room, where she said she found him “prone on his front side,” according to the affidavit, with the blanket balled up next to his head.
She then saw that he wasn’t breathing, and carried him out to the living room where she saw what she described as “strangle marks” on his neck with scratch marks around them.
She said she told Pollender-Savery to call 911 and she did “chest compressions” on Karsen prior to police and emergency personnel arriving.
A day later, May 8, police talked to Pollender-Savery, Dion wrote, and he told police he did go into the infant’s room that morning, leaving a bottle of formula for the child.
“He said Karsen was still sleeping as he could see Karsen’s blanket rising up and down on his body,” the detective added.
He said he then walked outside to start his car and when he came back in, Wood was entering the living room with Karsen in her arms telling him to call 911.
“I asked Tyler what he thought happened to Karsen on the morning of the 11th. He didn’t know but wondered if maybe Karsen died because of SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome),” Dion wrote. “I asked Tyler if thought Abby could have harmed Karsen and he didn’t think so.”
Asked what he thought might have happened, Dion wrote, “Tyler said he didn’t know and he would have told us earlier if he did.”
Cahill, the prosecutor, in court Monday said that two days prior to the infant’s death, Pollender-Savery exchanged messages on social media with a friend expressing his concern about Wood getting back together with Karsen’s biological father.
“People are guna start dyeing,” Cahill said, reading from the police affidavit that quotes the messages written by Pollender-Savery at that time.
The day after Karsen’s death, the prosecutor said, Pollender-Savery messaged another friend about Karsen’s death, writing, “None of this would have happened if I just let Abby do what she wanted when we met,” adding, “It’s my fault jake I don’t know how to fucking deal with that.”
In other Facebook message cited in the affidavit, Pollender-Savery told friends that the infant “got wrapped up in a blanket and suffocated.”
Cahill, in asking for Pollender-Savery to be held without bail, said ex-coworkers and a former girlfriend had described the murder suspect as “hot-tempered, and generally threatening of people who annoy him.”
When he was arrested at a state police barracks Monday, the prosecutor said, Pollender-Savery also had a loaded firearm in his vehicle.
Howard, Pollender-Savery’s attorney, responded in court that getting angry doesn’t make a person a murderer.
The defense attorney also disputed that his client posed a threat because he showed up at the state police barracks with a loaded weapon in his vehicle, pointing out hunting season has only recently come to an end.
“Welcome to Vermont, that is not unusual,” Howard told the judge. “It doesn’t indicate that he is prone to violence, it indicates that he hunts.”
That drew a quick reply from Cahill.
“I have yet to meet somebody who hunted with a handgun,” the prosecutor said. “That’s what the defendant had when he was taken into custody by police.”
If convicted of the charge of second-degree murder, Pollender-Savery faces up to life in prison.
Read the story on VTDigger here: Police say Ludlow man killed girlfriend’s infant son; he denies murder charge.