Valerie Owusu, Emmanuel Addae left beaten boy to die, prosecutor says at murder trial

A Queens couple failed for three days to seek medical help for a “severely beaten” 5-year-old child in their care for fear they might be arrested, a Suffolk prosecutor argued during opening statements in their murder trial Tuesday.

In the 72 hours that followed, the condition of King Owusu, who had seven months earlier been brought from Ghana to live with his mother and her boyfriend in an apartment in LeFrak City, deteriorated until he was eventually pronounced dead at a Suffolk County hospital on April 1, 2021, Assistant District Attorney Elena Tomaro told the jury.

“They had three days to try to save his life, three days to provide medical care,” Tomaro said of defendants Valerie Owusu and Emmanuel Addae. “They made a decision to ignore what they saw, to ignore what was happening to him, and to let him die.”

Owusu and Addae, both 28, were arrested in April 2022 and are each charged with second-degree “depraved indifference” murder in the trial before acting Supreme Court Justice Steven Pilewski in Riverhead.

Suffolk County prosecutors allege King was beaten by his mother and Addae in the apartment he shared with them and his sister on March 30, 2021. A next-door neighbor, who prosecutors said will testify at trial, is expected to tell the jury she heard “banging and whipping noises” through a wall that divides their units.

Tomaro said King suffered more than 100 cuts and bruises “from the top of his head to the bottom of his feet” due to repeated blows from five different objects located in the family’s apartment, including wooden sticks and a belt. She said the boy was “punched, slapped and thrown into furniture and the wall.”

Tomaro said medical experts will testify that King, who was 3 feet, 6 inches tall and weighed 49 pounds, had internal bleeding and tissue injuries and he suffered lung and brain damage, leading to his death.

“What you're going to learn from those experts is that the child's physical injuries began to evolve and his condition declined over two to three days,” said Tomaro. 

Tomaro said cellphone evidence shows the only time Owusu and Addae used their phones the morning King died was to order coffee to be delivered from Starbucks. That afternoon, they took him to Addae’s parents’ house in Brentwood after making the decision they no longer wanted him to live with them, Tomaro said.

Surveillance video of the family leaving the apartment, which Tomaro said will be played for the jury, shows Addae “striking a blow to the head” of King while carrying him on his shoulder, the prosecutor added.

Tomaro said that after dropping King off in Brentwood, Owusu and Addae took the daughter they share together to a mall in Queens, but returned to Addae’s parents’ house after his mother called to report that King was vomiting and having trouble breathing.

Addae called 911 more than an hour later and eight minutes after arriving at his parents’ house in Brentwood for the second time, Tomaro said. Neither Addae nor Owusu, who remained inside a bedroom as paramedics tended to her son in another room, accompanied the boy in the ambulance ride to the hospital, where he was pronounced dead three minutes after arriving, the prosecutor said.

“The only people in that ambulance were the strangers to this little boy that were trying to save his life,” Tomaro told the jury.

In his own opening statement, Addae’s defense attorney, Raymond Baierlein, of Bay Shore, said it was clear to his client that King had succumbed to his injuries when he and Owusu did not join the boy in the ambulance.

“It was a done deal already,” Baierlein said. “He was finished.”

Baierlein conceded that King died of injuries suffered in a beating but said Suffolk prosecutors have “zero evidence” to tie his client to the violent attack. He said the objects investigators found inside the apartment did not turn up fingerprints or DNA evidence that they were handled by Addae. Baierlein called the injuries to the boy “superficial.”

“In terms of the physical beating that occurred, whoever did this event … it's not going to be sufficient evidence that they would have known that there was a grave risk of death by those actions,” Baierlein said.

The defense attorney referred to his client and Owusu as “inexperienced parents” who made the decision to get help from Addae’s mom, who he said has experience raising children and also did not call 911 based on what she observed. 

Owusu’s attorney, Rene Myatt, of Queens, told the jury she also believed prosecutors lacked sufficient evidence to arrest her client, saying she is “appalled at the case the district attorney” brought against her client.

Prosecutors allege both Owusu and Addae initially blamed King’s biological father for the beating that caused his death, which they said occurred when they visited Ghana, where he still lives. Tomaro said they lied about when they traveled and where they lived to conceal the crime. 

The trial will continue with prosecution witness testimony Wednesday.

By Grant Parpan

grant.parpan@newsday.com@GrantParpan

Grant Parpan covers Suffolk County courts and federal courts for Newsday. A Long Island native, he joined Newsday in 2022.