Justice for Henry – Part 10

PLEASE READ THESE BLOG POSTS FIRST:

• It’s Time to Go Fully Public With What Happened to My Son, Henry Granju
• JUSTICE FOR HENRY – PART 1
• JUSTICE FOR HENRY – PART 2
• JUSTICE FOR HENRY – PART 3
• JUSTICE FOR HENRY – PART 4
• JUSTICE FOR HENRY – PART 5
• JUSTICE FOR HENRY – PART 6
• JUSTICE FOR HENRY – PART 7
• JUSTICE FOR HENRY – PART 8
• JUSTICE FOR HENRY – A NOTE
• JUSTICE FOR HENRY – PART 9

If you are on Twitter (you can follow me at @kgranju),  please share a link to this blog post using the hashtag, #justiceforhenry

My original plan was to write each of these blog posts in chronological order, so that readers learned info and evidence in the same order that I discovered it along the way. I thought that a narrative structured  in this way would work best. But a number of readers have told me that they are somewhat confused by the way I’ve been organizing all the pieces of this story, so I’ve decided to try to clarify some things, and then return to the chronological narrative. I hope that by doing this. I answer any outstanding questions any of you may have at this point.

So here goes.

When Henry was admitted to the hospital, near death on April 27th 2010, no one in our family had ANY idea how he had ended up badly beaten up, suffering from an overdose and in a coma. Where had he been for the past 48 hours? Who had done this to him? Was the assault he’d clearly suffered a separate incident from the overdose? We knew absolutely nothing.

But there was one thing we absolutely DID know from the first hour we got to the hospital, and that thing is this: there is absolutely NO QUESTION that Henry was suffering from major, visible, life threatening physical injuries when he was brought into the hospital on April 27th.

As I have said repeatedly in every way that I can, I accept that when the Knox County Medical Examiner performed an autopsy nearly six weeks after my son was brought into the hospital, she saw no evidence that any of that earlier physical trauma had played a role in my son’s eventual death.  However, that doesn’t mean that the injuries didn’t exist on the front end of his hospitalization. They did. My son’s medical records make this abundantly clear, and every single person in our family who saw him in the first week of his hospitalization can attest to the black eyes, the heavily bruised chest, the blood running from both ears, etc.

In news coverage following my son’s death, the Knox County Sheriff’s Office refers repeatedly to the finding of the Knox County Medical Examiner, Dr. Darinka Mileusnic-Polchan that physical trauma was not the cause of Henry’s death.

Additinally, much of the media coverage immediately following Henry’s death left readers with the mistaken impression that our family was unreasonably insisting that Henry died from physical injuries alone, and that we totally disagreed with the ME’s autopsy findings. This was never the case, and still isn’t the case.

In fact, if you look at my blog posts written in the last few days of Henry’s life, I clearly explain that Henry was suffering from Delayed Post Hypoxic Leukoencephalopathy, a relatively rare complication of hypoxic brain injury. This is totally consistent with the Medical Examiner’s official cause of death. Henry’s treating neurologist’s records also confirm and support this cause of death.

The misconception that our family believed that Henry’s physical injuries were the primary cause of his death were related in part to comments my brother Robert made when reporters called him only a day or two after Henry died, when at my request he was  fielding media calls because I was simply too distraught to speak to anyone. In the comments he offered to a couple of media outlets in those first days, my brother described Henry’s injuries somewhat inaccurately. Henry was never diagnosed with broken ribs, and while his doctors believed for some time that his jaw was broken, they ultimately decided that it was not.

HOWEVER, the other details Robert offered reporters who called that week were totally accurate and are supported by Henry’s medical records. Henry was diagnosed with a basilar skull fracture, and he had a brain injury that every single neurologist we saw over almost 6 weeks of hospitalization told us was partly due to overdose-related hypoxia, and partly due to external trauma.  He suffered severe blunt trauma to the chest, leading to fluid around his heart, and his ears bled continuously for almost 2 weeks.

In his comments, Robert also told reporters who called in those first few days that the assault had happened at the BiLo Market on John Sevier Highway. In fact, that’s not where it happened at all, but that’s what we had been told all along by Detective H of the Sheriff’s Office, so at the time Robert gave this information to the media, that’s what our whole family believed. It was only after I began digging on my own, after Henry died, that I learned for the first time that no assault ever took place at the BiLo Market on John Sevier Highway.

On top of the fact that my brother’s facts were slightly off on specific details of Henry’s injuries in those first days after losing his nephew, the WAY in which my brother was questioned, and the way in which KCSO offered information they had gotten from the Knox County ME only served to bolster the suggestion that our family was unreasonably insisting that we disagreed with the autopsy results. Community members were left with that impression because the ONLY topic on which my brother and the ME were questioned and quoted were related to physical injury. No one asked either of them about his hypoxic brain injury, or about the DPHL complication. The way the Sheriff presented information to the media left the clear impression that there existed a fundamental dispute between the ME and our family’s beliefs regarding the cause of Henry’s death. This was not the case.

I should have spoken up then and set the record straight. I should have called reporters, left comments under news stories and clarified things. But honestly, I was just too heartbroken to debate details of news coverage to anyone at that time. I had SEEN my son’s physical injuries. I had wiped the blood away, and heard doctors explain the blunt chest trauma, skull fracture, etc. The last thing I felt like doing that first week was trying to prove to people that these terrible physical injuries had ever existed at all.

To be clear, I continue to believe that a bad blow to the head likely did make things worse for Henry when he then overdosed on top of it. And in any case, serious assault-related injuries shouldn’t be ignored or written offf by law enforcement just because they don’t end up killing the assault victim

But where did these physical injuries come from? As I said, on the day Henry was admitted to the hospital, Chris and I had absolutely no idea what had put our son in this condition. However, within just a few hours of Henry being admitted, evidence began to mount that the injuries had to have come from an assault he’d suffered a day or two before the overdose and ER admission. The evidence included:

• The Sheriff’s deputy who visited us in the ER told us that the people in whose house Henry had been found had told paramedics that there had been some kind of assault in the previous day or two.
• Three or four of Henry’s friends whom I already knew texted me during that first day to tell me that Henry had told them that he’d been assaulted with a tire iron a day or so before he ended up in the hospital. These friends gave us three specific names of suspects, which we gave to Detective H as soon as he called us the first time.
• Henry’s grandmother told us that when she spoke to him by phone on the afternoon of April 26th, he’d told her that he’d been beat up the day before.
• Within a week or so, Detective H confirmed to us that Henry had been assaulted by the three young men whose names we had given him.

So, given the fact that we had a son who had clearly been beaten up badly, and a Sheriff’s Deputy and Henry’s friends telling us that there had been a specific assault in the 24-48 hours before he ended up in the hospital, our family reasonably believed that the confirmed assault HAD to be the cause of the physical injuries. The series of events that seemed to make sense at that early point in figuring things out was that Henry was beat up a day or so before going home with R and Y on the evening of April 26th, and he then overdosed inside their house trailer, compounding his external brain trauma from the assault.

Our family continued to believe this version of events for months. At the time of Henry’s death, relying on Detective H’s confirmation of the assault prior to the overdose, my brother spoke of this version of events to the media, and I continued to blog about this version of events for some time. The Sheriff told the media that this assault was the only thing they had even investigated, so it had to matter the most, right? That’s the assumption I had for quite a while, until I started looking into things myself.

It turns out that that our initial beliefs regarding what happened to Henry were pretty much completely wrong. That initial assault DID happen on the evening of April 25, and over the last months I have discovered a great deal about it. I continue to believe that the young men who beat the tar out of Henry should have been arrested and charged. However, I now believe that the major and very visible physical injuries that Henry had at hospital admission were NOT the result of that April 25 assault. I now believe that there may have been a second assault that took place in the 15 or so hours during which my child was in the custody of Y and R, inside their home, incapacitated by drugs they gave him, and at their complete mercy.

So here’s what I’ve discovered since Henry’s death about that April 25th assault:

• On the evening of April 25th, two of Henry’s friends drove him from Fort Sanders (a downtown Knoxville neighborhood) to a park in south Knoxville to meet three young men for a prearranged drug deal. Henry was selling ten pills for other people.
• Henry’s two friends waited near their car while Henry walked off into the park with the three young men. After a lengthy period of time, Henry still had not returned. Dark was approaching, and his friends were getting nervous. Finally, a minivan with a woman driving pulled up. Henry was in the passenger seat. He was crying and disheveled. He told his friends he’d been robbed and hit in the head with a tire iron.
• The woman explained to Henry’s two friends that she had found him in this terrible condition in a nearby neighborhood, and had insisted on taking him to the hospital. He must have looked pretty bad for a complete stranger to put a hippie teenager kid in her minivan and drive him to get help.
• Henry apparently told the woman that his friends would take him to get medical care if she would just take him back to where they were waiting. When she let Henry out of the car, she asked the two friends if they would be sure to get Henry to a doctor. They said they would. The woman drove away.
• This woman is a very important witness. She might have actually seen some or all of the April 25 assault. However, KCSO has made ZERO attempt to find her (I will document the specifics of this failure on their part in an upcoming blog post).
• In fact, KCSO did not even interview Henry’s two friends who drove him to the park that day until AFTER Henry died (this is according to one of the two friends, who was probably Henry’s best female pal, and whom I’ve known for a long time. She has spoken to me at length about what happened that day, and about how and when KCSO interviewed her).
• That means that when Sheriff Jones declared emphatically in a newspaper interview only a few days after Henry’s death that there were no witnesses to the April 25 assault  (an assault that the three assailants KCSO did interview admitted committing) in fact, KCSO had not made even a minimal effort to discover whether there were any witnesses.
• Additionally, Henry’s text messages in the hours following the assault make the details of what happened pretty darn clear. In the texts, Henry has a conversation with one of the three named assailants in which that person completely admits his role. Also, both he and Henry confirm  in the text conversation that this particular person was not involved in actually beating Henry; they both agree that it was the other two guys who actually committed the assault.
• As I’ve mentioned in earlier blog posts, I had basically begged KCSO to take Henry’s cell phone and look at the text messages as soon as we got it back a few days after Henry was admitted to the hospital. I described the texts related to the assault to Detective H in detail. But he repeatedly declined. Again, this means that when Sheriff Jones told the media right after Henry’s death that there had been an exhaustive investigation into April 25th assault, and that no corroborating evidence or witnesses could be located, he was totally misleading the reporters interviewing him, as well as the citizens he is elected to serve.

NOTE: I am happy to report that within the past 14 days, the Knox County DA’s office arranged for someone from KCSO to meet me and pick up both of the cell phones I had, one belonging to Henry and one Henry had but which wasn’t his. I’ve had these phones in my possession for the past 10 months. I have no idea why after all these months of me trying every way I knew how to explain how important the texts on the phones are, the DA’s office suddenly decided to take them to look at them, but I am just grateful that they have.

NEXT: Part 11

PLEASE READ THESE BLOG POSTS FIRST:

• It’s Time to Go Fully Public With What Happened to My Son, Henry Granju
• JUSTICE FOR HENRY – PART 1
• JUSTICE FOR HENRY – PART 2
• JUSTICE FOR HENRY – PART 3
• JUSTICE FOR HENRY – PART 4
• JUSTICE FOR HENRY – PART 5
• JUSTICE FOR HENRY – PART 6
• JUSTICE FOR HENRY – PART 7
• JUSTICE FOR HENRY – PART 8
• JUSTICE FOR HENRY – A NOTE
• JUSTICE FOR HENRY – PART 9

If you are on Twitter (you can follow me at @kgranju),  please share a link to this blog post using the hashtag, #justiceforhenry