Nobody Should Believe Me - S07 E03: Two Steps

Episode Date: April 9, 2026

After 15-month old Knowellan Kelly is rushed to the hospital following a seizure, doctors discover catastrophic injuries. Andrea walks through the medical evidence with experts whose findings point to repeated inflicted trauma. As investigators struggle to reconcile conflicting accounts from John Stewart and Knowellan’s mother and grandfather, a tangled web emerges.  Featuring: Dr. Sally Smith, Child Abuse Pediatrician Dr. Russell Vega, Medical Examiner Matthew Torbenson, Assistant District Attorney Dr. Stephen Boos, Child Abuse Pediatrician *** Vote for us for the Webby's People's Voice Award: https://vote.webbyawards.com/PublicVoting#/2026/podcasts/features/best-indie-podcast Try out Andrea’s Podcaster Coaching App: https://studio.com/apps/andrea/podcaster Order Andrea’s book The Mother Next Door: Medicine, Deception, and Munchausen by Proxy: https://read.macmillan.com/lp/the-mother-next-door-9781250284273/ View our sponsors: https://www.nobodyshouldbelieveme.com/sponsors/ Remember that using our codes helps advertisers know you’re listening and helps us keep making the show!   Subscribe on YouTube where we have bonus content: https://www.youtube.com/@NobodyShouldBelieveMePod Follow Andrea on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/andreadunlop/ Buy Andrea's books: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Andrea-Dunlop/author/B005VFWJPI For more information and resources on Munchausen by Proxy, please visit: https://www.munchausensupport.com/ The American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children’s MBP Practice Guidelines: https://apsac.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Munchausen-by-Proxy-Clinical-and-Case-Management-Guidance-.pdf Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

True Story Media Please note that this show discusses child abuse, which may be difficult for some listeners. For resources about abusive head trauma, go to shakenbaby.org. Mitch County 911 with the address of the emergency. I've got a baby that's really sick here. He's coming in and out of consciousness.

Tell me exactly what happened to him. He's been sick. He's been running a fever. Okay, so fever. I get him some liquids. He threw it up, and then now he's just rolling around. He's going in and out of consciousness.

He's getting CPR given to him right now. Okay. right there with him? I'm here with him, yes. How old is I old? He's a little over a year old. One year old? Yes, he's out of, he's out, he's a little over a year old. Okay, did he have a seizure? He seems like he had almost had a seizure, yes. Okay, tell him to stop doing CPR if it's a seizure. Is he breathing? Is he breathing? Yeah, clearly, he's just casping. He's in bad shape. I understand I'm getting help on the way, try to stay calm. That's the only way we can help him, okay?

On December 12, 2015, Nolan Kelly was taken to Manatee Memorial Hospital after his grandfather, Larry Crawford, called 911. He arrived at the hospital at 10.21 a.m. and was transferred to Johns Hopkins All Children's around 12.30 p.m., where he was placed on life support and examined by child abuse pediatrician, Dr. Sally Smith. Officers from the Manatee County Sheriff's Office responded and interviewed Danica and Larry at the hospital, and John shortly after at Larry's house. and thus began their attempts to unravel what had led to 15-month-old Nolan's grave condition. People believe their eyes. That's something that is so central to this topic because we do believe the people that we love when they're telling us something. If we didn't, you could never make it through your day. I'm Andrea Dunlop, and this is Nobody Should Believe Me.

Did you know you can binge the first six episodes of Season 7 ad-free right now by subscribing on Apple Podcasts or Patreon. And not only that, we have a second batch of episodes coming very soon to that feed. This has been a big season, so we split it up into two parts, but we promise it will be worth the wait. In the meantime, we have a favor to ask. Nobody Should Believe Me has been nominated for a Webby Award for Best Indy Podcast, a huge honor. We would love your vote for the People's Voice Award if you have a moment. You can find that link in our show notes.

Thank you, as always, for your support. Visit BetMGM Casino and check out the newest exclusive. The Price is Right Fortune Pick. BetMDM and GameSense remind you to play responsibly. 19 plus to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you,

please contact connects Ontario at 1-866-531-2,600 to speak to an advisor. Free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. John walked us through his version of the events that preceded Nolan's hospitalization, starting with Friday the morning of December 11th. I take Danica to work, drop her off, and then we went to Larry's house, which is the grandfather, and stayed there for basically the whole day. And that's Friday. And I cooked, I'm pretty sure, I think eggs and bacon or sausage or something like that scrambled eggs, fed all the kids. fed all the kids, and the whole time I'm sending pictures and videos to Danica

because she just started her job, and I didn't want her to feel like she was missing out on anything with her kids. This was December, and like many families with small children, just about everyone was getting over some type of cold, as Danica explained to the police. So what happened? Are you, you assuming children are sick? Yeah. I'm sick. John's been sick.

My mom just got over really bad. cold. No one's been teething. He's getting the big, you know, the big teeth back. He's been really fussy. Well, I mean, not really fussy. He hasn't run any fevers. He hasn't had any rashes or diarrhea or anything, but you can see where his teeth are growing in. He hasn't really been sick. So, no one, no one has had a running nose. When did that start? Yesterday. Are you aware of kind of what happened yesterday? I just needed a seizure yesterday. And if it's all right, what happened today, you had to write it. About 10 seconds, and then he snapped out of it and it was fine.

Okay, but you didn't notify your record pediatrician or any way of the bed time. Okay. In addition to the seizure that Nolan had suffered immediately before the Saturday 911 call, it would come to light that he had suffered a seizure the day before as well. He fell asleep, I believe, in the white chair, if I'm not mistaken. And then basically a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of the same. But after that, I took a picture of all three of us laying there, sent it to Danica. And then I heard Nolan make a noise.

It was a weird noise, so I got up and I looked at him. And I still had the phone in my hand. So I was like, oh, let me take a picture of this. This isn't normal. And I sent it to her. He was a picture of video. It was just a picture. And I said, and I'm pretty sure what I said was because that morning she had asked me to give him some medicine.

And I couldn't find any of it. until that point. Was it like antibiotics or? No, no, no, no. It was the the baby fever. It's like baby tongue all right? Yeah, exactly, exactly. So, and I remember saying, I'm pretty sure he just had a seizure, but it's not because I gave him medicine. Because I know some kids, well, from what I've read, kids who have, who take medicine can have a seizure and stuff like that, or just from having a fever. I mean, there's so many reasons that I've come to find out the seizures happen. And so I told her, you know, I don't think it was because of that. And then right after that, I found the freaking medicine. And I sent her a picture and I was like, so do you think I should still give him some? But she, the first day on Thursday, she was able to respond to me because she was just doing training.

And she was left on her own to watch stupid videos and crap like that. So she was able to, you know, and then Friday, I didn't basically hear from her until, I think, an hour before I had to go pick her up. So like until the end of the day. Yeah, exactly. Danica had told the police about a series of messages she'd received from John throughout the day that included photos and videos of Nolan. So when police arrived at Larry's house to interview John, they confiscated his cell phone and asked him if he had any other phones.

He said he didn't, but when a deputy saw him with one an hour later, they confiscated that as well. The police eventually recovered a series of messages and pictures, beginning at around 10 a.m. on Friday, showing Nolan draped over the side of a chair. There was a second photo where Nolan did not appear to be awake, and a third photo of him in a high chair with a plate of food in front of him, where his head is lulled back and his eyes are closed.

This third photo includes a message that reads, Not really happy, but eating. He's getting worse, where is the medicine? Then, around 1215, John messages Danica to say, I think Nolan just had a seizure. He was napping on the bed, let out a loud yell, and then I got up and he was laying like he does. He's back asleep now.

It's not the medicine. I couldn't find it. I'll keep you updated. In the last message sent around 1230, John says that he found medicine, notes that Nolan is resting comfortably, and shows a photo of him laying down with his eyes closed. Here's what John told us about those messages. I think he might have had, you know, a fit or a seizure because her other son has fits and seizures all the time. So I let her know, you know, I was like, hey, you know, this is what's my person? going on. You know, what do you want me to do? And she was just like basically said, just monitor them.

If you gets any worse, if anything else happens, you know, take him to the doctor, to the hospital, if not. When I see him, when you pick me up from work, I'll determine from there. But according to John's police interview, Danica didn't see the messages until hours after Nolan's seizure. And we got in the car. We left. he got Danica

we talked about because that was the first time that we were actually because you know she saw the text around three or four or something like that and responded but we were unable to actually talk until I picked her up so we talked about everything she took Nolan out of the car seat she looked at him we drove home

we get to the house she has him hold her hands and he walks over to the grandpa grandpa takes him goes into the other room and we get ready to take off because we try to not be there as often as possible

so we took off as soon as possible so it took about an hour and then we went back to the house we gave Nolan Whole Milk which he's not used to normally we have 2%

and he ended up chugging three quarters of the Sippy Cup, and then we left him in my bedroom on my bed. And I came out, and I forget what I was doing. Like, I think I was cooking dinner for us or something like that. And I came in to check on something, and I saw Nolan had thrown up. Danica was doing something herself, so I freaking, I changed him, well, not changed him, but took him out of the soil clothing and bundled up the bedding, threw it next to the laundry room, and she took him and gave him a bath. And then she put him down in the pack and play

and gave him a bottle of water. And basically, every couple hours, she got up and check on him. I asked John about his decision not to seek medical care when Nolan had his first seizure. I figured that because he was teething and was sick, had a fever and everything like that, that his body just, you know, got to a point that was like, okay, just shut down like his brother does and then restarted. And then that's the way that I viewed it.

Okay. And what about the, you know, what about his conditions in those photographs? I mean, I can't speak out obviously to stuff that I haven't seen. But, I mean, I think just for me, you know, I have like, I have a six-year-old in this year old, right? And I, so this is all very recent that I've had kids this age. And I just think if my 15-month-old, or if I was taking care of any 15-month-old, that was, you know, essentially not conscious. I mean, he doesn't appear to be conscious in those photos. I would seek medical attention, you know, especially if they had a seizure-like activity and they

hadn't had. I mean, had you seen Nolan have a seizure before? Because you're a pretty regular caretaker at this point of the kids, right? At that point, no, none of us had seen him have a seizure at that point. Yeah. I mean, you can understand, you can understand my question about that, right? I do understand it, but at the, when at the time, I deferred to Danica's decision. I sent her messages. I let her know exactly what was going on. I, you know, I wasn't like trying to hide anything or be like, you know, I'm like, this is Nolan. Your grandmother said that he was sick last night. Now I have him. this morning and she said that he was sick in her in her um in her thing in her deposition or not deposition but in her first interview at the hospital with detective luke and um you know and so

i when i picked him up when i picked her up he was fine she said it so i understand the pictures i guess i took pictures at bad times when i don't know but he was not unconscious he was not, he was sleeping at certain times. Yes, there's no question, but he was not unconscious. I have seen these photos, and obviously I'm not a medical professional, but it's hard to square what I see looking at them with what John describes here. Fortunately, to very experienced medical professionals that were involved in Nolan's case, the child abuse pediatrician Dr. Sally Smith and the medical examiner Dr. Russell Vega have also seen these photos. Here's what Dr. Smith had to say.

considering what these photos look like and the severity of his brain swelling by the time he got to the hospital and how quickly he died. I mean, they're just... So that aside, when you have, especially a fatal level of abusive head trauma,

the child has a change of consciousness that doesn't change significantly. It can worsen, but he's not going to be like sitting up eating pizza, playing games or something after he suffers that level of brain injury. The brain is injured to the point that it's going to proceed to die. There's no, you know, normal level of activity. Now, you know, you can imagine in a six or eight week old, they don't do a whole lot. So sometimes it can be

a little bit difficult to tell exactly, you know, whether they were normal or not at a certain point in time. But a 15-month-old child, he walks, he talks, he, you know, runs around, plays, he gets into arguments with his sibling, whatever. There's all kinds of things that that child does. And, you know, from the time that those photos started being sent to Danica, at which time John was the caretaker for the child, and he admits that he was the caretaker for the child, he was asleep. That's not normal for a 15-month-old to be asleep all afternoon, vomiting, having weird movements, whether they're seizures or not, arching his back in a very abnormal manner. He clearly had, in my experience and, you know, training significantly abnormal

neurological condition on all of those photos. Larry and Danica, the other two adults who were around Nolan during this time, describe him as either asleep or fussy and lethargic after Friday morning. During this time, both also report vomiting, which in addition to the seizure, is a possible sign of abusive head trauma. Danica describes Nolan falling asleep in the car shortly after John came to pick her up on Friday evening, but does say that he seemed more or less okay when she gave him a bath that night. Dr. Sally Smith recalls what she observed in her evaluation of Nolan on Sunday December 13th. I don't work for the child protection team anymore, so I have limited to no access to my records to really look exactly what happened,

who called me, that kind of thing. But this child, Nolan Kelly, went to community hospital first on December 12, 2015. And he was in very serious condition. They put him on a ventilator immediately. They gave him things to try to decrease his brain swelling. He was unresponsive. He had some pupillary activity, but they immediately called Johns Hopkins All Children's and sent him there for further management. And by the time he got to the ER, the first person that saw him said his pupils were reactive, but by the time the neurosurgeons saw him, like a half hour later, they were not.

So he was in a condition of rapidly progressing, you know, critical brain dysfunction. What is that the pupils being reactive versus non-reactive? Like, what does that indicate specifically? Well, the control of pupils closing and opening in response to light is controlled by a deep part of the brain called brain stem. And when the brain stem is losing function, the pupils no longer show that normal reaction to light. And so that's one of the things, especially a child who comes in that seems to be in a coma, unresponsive. In his case, he was having very infrequent abnormal breaths that he was taking.

He was like limp. He was not responding to any kind of. They do like things that would normally be kind of painful to make kids move and he was doing nothing. And so the pupils, as the deep part of the brain, gets, the brain swells and it puts pressure on that deep part of the brain. And as that process occurs, it stops the normal functions in the brainstem. So in his case, the pupils were no longer being, um, receiving messages, you know, from the brain to close and open. Um, his respiratory center was no longer working. His, his circulatory heart kind of part of the deep brain,

was still functioning reasonably well. That all changed in the subsequent 24 hours. Doctors at both Manatee Memorial and Johns Hopkins All Children's had seen and evaluated Nolan's injuries prior to Dr. Sally Smith's involvement. After reviewing their notes, the history given at the first hospital and Nolan's imaging, Smith evaluated him for the suspected diagnosis of abusive head trauma. It's a very particular pattern of hemorrhage over the surface of the brain. The other thing that some of the children have, but not all, probably in my experience, at least 70, 75% of them have hemorrhages in the back of the eye. So the eyeball in the back, there's like an open fluid cavity inside your eyeball.

And then at the very back is what's called the retina. and that's where your visual receptors are, and that's how we see and everything. Well, back there, there's also a lot of blood vessels because anything that's active like that retina needs a lot of blood and oxygen. So there's a lot of blood vessels. And so those eyeballs are attached with nerves to the brain.

So when the brain's moving all over the place, it's pulling and putting traction on, the eyeballs themselves and that retina. hemorrhages. And so, you know, when you have, and it's not just any retinal hemorrhages, there's a certain pattern that's associated with abusive head trauma. If you have them in both eyes, there's like 11 layers of the retina. If you have hemorrhages in four or five layers, the whole retina is all blood, not just a little hemorrhage here or there, then that's a pattern that it's either, you know, falling out of the third floor window, which people will

should know about or a bad car crash or it's abuse of head trauma. And so, you know, we have to, I mean, you want to look at all the information you can get to make a correct decision, an educated decision about whether or not it's child abuse. But if you have certain medical findings, it's honestly fairly straightforward. And with this case in particular, did they have both of those two, there was both of these hemorrhages that you're speaking about. Oh, yes. Yeah. Yes.

Yeah. And I believe that's in your report and is also in the medical examiner's report. Correct. In addition to the injuries to Nolan's head and neck, both doctors also noted the presence of old and new rib fractures. Here's medical examiner, Dr. Russell Vega. The healing rib fractures mean that the child sustained rib fractures at some point, well before all these events transpired weeks ago.

maybe longer. You know, is it possible that a child could get rib fractures by themselves and it be accidental? Sure. Is it likely that's going to happen without any medical evaluation or care? Well, it becomes a lot less likely. Then to get acute rib fractures also that are not healed, which happened within days, short days of these events. Again, we're talking about another trauma event and How many trauma events that you get that are severe that could all be accidental? That kind of coincidence, while I think, you know, we have to at least briefly consider it, is not in my mind reasonable.

So this cumulative nature of these other injuries is what leads me to the, I think, inevitable conclusion that this is not accidental trauma in this child. That being said, having these other injuries out there doesn't help with the primary challenge here in figuring out when the really lethal injuries occurred and how they occurred. We wanted to take a moment to zero in on the rib fractures that were observed in Nolan, which are common in these types of cases and a sign of ongoing abuse. Here's Matthew Torbenson, an assistant district attorney who has worked on dozens of abuse cases, talking about the significance of injuries like this. So I think the hardest cases for us are the cases where a child's being abused time and time again,

where a child is a battered child. And oftentimes what we can say conclusively, beyond a reasonable doubt in those cases, is this child is being abused and this child is being abused repeatedly. What becomes really hard is identifying who abused that child within the household, who's the person that committed it. Because when a child's being abused time and time again, and you have multiple incidents of abuse, it opens up the time frame in the window during when that child could have been abused.

And why do people shake children? They shake children because it works. It quiets the child. You're rattling that child's brain. You're inflicting that brain trauma on it. But we do have cases where you have compounding brain injury over a period of time. And so you're not just seeing an acute brain injury and acute bleeding, but you may be seeing chronic blood and then acute blood on top of the chronic blood.

in those situations, we can say this child's likely being abused on multiple times, on multiple occasions over a period of time. And we also know that abuse escalates with children. So it may start off with just a squeezing of the head or a squeezing of the jaw, where you get some fingertip bruises on a child, and then it may escalate to squeezing the ribs, and then it may escalate from there to shaking the child. And we see that oftentimes, too.

So I have a couple cases in my office that I refer to as my box cases, and they travel with me whenever I switch offices in the DA's office. And they're the cases where I know the child was abused. I just can't prove which one of the parents inside the home did it. And they're the hardest cases to handle, and they're also the hardest for me to let go of. I think one of the most curious pieces of this of the Nolan Kelly case, you know, is that we had these, there were the acute injuries that happened sometime in this time. time period, you know, before he went to the hospital. But then there were evidence of older rib fractures that could have been, you know, days to weeks old. And it's hard to imagine how his other caretakers could have not noticed that he was in pain because they all sort of

described, okay, he was normal until, you know, that morning before the time period where we suspect these acute injuries happen. And, I mean, do you have any insight on? Absolutely. So the rib fractures are going to be really painful at the time that they're inflicted. And the child's going to scream out likely in pain as a result of the ribs, the ribs being broken. But oftentimes what we see in those cases is the ribs after they're fractured, they may be stabilized. They may not be displaced. And so when they're not displaced and they're not poking in to the lungs or anything like that, they're generally stable and they're not going to cause a whole lot of additional pain to that child unless the child is being handled or manipulated by the ribs held by the ribs.

Breathing may be painful for the child depending on the size of the child, but it's going to appear to the non-offending parent as the child's just fussy or that the child just doesn't, you know, seems hard to console or things of that nature. They may not be picking up or associating. Every time I touch the child's ribs, that's what causes the child to wince in pain or to cry out. They may not connect those experiences because they're not the abusive parent. In addition to the injuries to Nolan's brain, spinal cord, and back,

which would have been sustained in the short term, he had old and new rib fractures, some of which were likely from days to weeks before. And these injuries were even more challenging to put a timeline, too. It's worth reiterating that while the family had had a number of CPS reports that preceded John's arrival on the scene, those were reports of inadequate supervision and environmental hazards, often having to do with Danica's substance abuse. There had never been any previous report of parental physical abuse. And then when did you guys move in with each other?

It's only been, I mean, it's only been consistent for two or three months. Has there any times when he's watched children for, something just didn't seem right. We're not talking about, you need to take your love side out of it, but is there anything that, I mean, your mom, is your children, is there anything that's out of the ordinary that, you know. I mean, my older kids, they're fine with them. I mean, it's, I don't know.

I mean, sometimes it's, yeah, sometimes it seems abnormal. Nolan isn't fond of him. You know what I mean? He doesn't want to be, like, he wants me to coddle him, you know, and he wants me to hold him and hug him, and he wants, you know, he likes when my dad does it, he likes my mom, and he just, he's not like that with John. But John isn't,

John isn't affectionate towards the kids, the way that we are, you know, the way that me and my family. we are. I mean, he's affectionate towards his daughter, but it's a new relationship. He just met my kids. You know, my kids just met him. Winter was long this year, but spring, my favorite season is finally here. I am ready to pack away my wool sweaters on the high shelf and head over to shop Quince's Spring Edit. So I've been talking about how Quince has become my one-stop shop for clothes and accessories, so I really loved their curated collections. And the spring at it does not disappoint. It features 100% European linen tops and pants, their Italian leather

woven bags and totes. This tote was one of my favorite purchases from last year, and even sunglasses. So famously people in Seattle buy a lot of sunglasses because we forget that the sun exists and we lose them. But like everything on quince, these sunglasses are luxury quality without the big price tag. So I am treating myself to a pair of the Barcelona polarized acetate shades. other favorite thing in the spring edit is their light cotton cashmere sweaters, which are perfect for those chilly spring mornings and evenings. Refresh your spring wardrobe with quince. Go to quince.com slash believe for free shipping and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada too. Go to Q-U-I-N-C-E.com slash believe for free shipping and 365-day returns. Quince.com slash believe.

And remember that shopping our sponsors is a great way to support the show. It's 6 p.m. after a long workday, your two children are hitting the energy crescendo that happens just as you and your spouse are at your most depleted. Bedtime looms just out of reach and you cling to the hope of being able to watch one brief episode of grown-up television before you yourself collapse. Everyone in the house is hangary. What do you do? Don't panic. You have HelloFresh. So while your kids are bouncing off the walls, you're assembling a quick and delicious

homemade meal with pre-portioned ingredients from a recipe so easy, you can execute it with the three brain cells you have left. And even better, you picked something from Hello Fresh's family-friendly menu options, so your beloved wild animals will actually eat it. Will they get up five times to do a dance routine and cartwheels while eating it? Maybe. But you didn't have to resort to dino nuggets, and that feels good. And with Hello Fresh, you never have to fall back on boring beige food because you can choose from over 80 plus global recipes every month, including Vietnamese, Moroccan, Caribbean, and more. So many options made so easy. So forget the freezer meals. Don't blow your budget on takeout. Get HelloFresh because nothing hits like home cooking. Go to hellofresh.com slash Nobody 10 FM now to get 10 free meals and a free Nutra Bullet Ultra Plus 2 and one compact kitchen system, a 18999 value on your third box.

Free meals applied as a discount on the first box, new subscribers only, varies by plan. Disclaimer must order the third box by May 31st, 2026. You can find all that information at the link in our show notes, and remember that shopping our sponsors is a great way to support the show. John described to the police the events of Friday evening, the day of Nolan's first seizure, about 12 hours before the second incident that would lead Larry to call 911. We get to the house. she has him hold her hands and he walks over to the grandpa. Grandpa takes him, goes into the other room, and we get ready to take off. Whether or not Nolan walked during this time period is a key question,

and something that John is pretty insistent about. We got up early the next morning. That would be Saturday. And Danica went and got Nolan. And apparently, as it says, and from Danica's report, and then Sally Smith's report, even says that Nolan reached up to her, took two steps towards her, and, you know, was happy to see her in the morning. As John mentions here, there is a brief note in Dr. Sally Smith's report,

where she writes that, according to the mother, Nolan had looked up at her on Saturday morning and reached his arms towards her and took two steps, but was not himself. Dr. Smith's report also says that Danica reported that Nolan had been lethargic from the time John picked her up from work the day before, and had had multiple instances of vomiting, and was looking off into space, quote, not there, quote, rigid, and, quote, crying out in discomfort. These comments from Danica are a secondhand report from the detective, so it's hard to properly contextualize them. In the many hours of police interviews we obtained in our public records request, as well as the tranche of documents and depositions John himself sent us.

We cannot find anyone giving a first-person account of witnessing Nolan Walk on Friday evening. or Saturday morning. When John spoke to the police, he told them Nolan was walking, sort of, on Friday. And so I took my daughter, Nolan, and the oldest. And we all came down and got Danica. And then we came back. Danica noticed that he was not really like looking his normal self in the car. And I told, I explained to her everything that happened. And so she took him out of the car seat. She looked at him, and he was feeling, like, not rigid, you know what I'm saying? But he was a little bit wobbly, like his balance was off. And then we came back home, and she put him down to let him walk to Papa, and he wasn't really walking.

He was, you know, like, I wouldn't even say that he put any pressure. I think she was holding him more than anything. However, in our interview with John, he cites Sally Smith's report recounting Danica saying that Nolan took two steps Saturday. Danica did a number of lengthy interviews with the police, going over the events of Friday and Saturday. In one conversation with the sergeant who is administering the truth verification exam, she does mention Nolan walking and crawling.

But it's very unclear if she witnessed this or was just reporting it. She also doesn't specify exactly when on Friday or Saturday she's talking about. Unfortunately, the sergeant doesn't ask her to clarify. In the far more detailed interviews she did with the lead detective and the prosecutor, she doesn't mention seeing Nolan walk or crawl. Here's what John said to the police about Saturday morning. Saturday morning? Yep.

And how was Nolan there? He didn't, he seemed basically the same as Friday. You know, just a little lethargic, a little bit out of it. He was up and he was responsive, you know, like he responded to his name. He, you know, like, we'd be like, hey, Nolan, you know, and he'd turn and look and, um, yeah, yeah, he seemed like... Fine? Not, I wouldn't say fine, but he didn't, but he didn't, but he didn't seem like he was a little bit worse, though. Um, I don't really think so. Um, I don't recall him being any worse, because if he had been worse, then,

then, okay, so, we, we left and Danica, I dropped Danica off it. work. And she was like, you know, if anything changes, if he gets any worse, you know, take him to the hospital. Obviously, she saw something, though, obviously that, you know, for her to bring that to your attention that if he gets anything worse, you know, hey, let's take him to the doctor. So, no mention of steps there. In her police interview, Danica recounts Nolan reaching up to her, but says nothing about him taking any steps. We got back to my dad's all the way until this morning. And when I went and got him out of the playpen this morning. He looked at me. He reached out from his day to pick him up. I changed his diaper.

My grandpa? I got the call from John saying that my dad was going to June to the hospital. John insists that Nolan was walking after the original seizure on Friday and presents this as exculpatory evidence that he did not cause the fatal injury to Nolan. This is partly tied to the medical examiners report, which will get into a lot more detail in our conversation with Dr. Vega. Larry never mentions Nolan walking or crawling, and by his account, he, quote, never made it to the floor on Saturday. These steps, however they happened or whether they happened at all, may seem like a small detail, but child abuse medicine is very much about trying to reconcile the information provided from caretakers,

the child's medical condition, and whatever other evidence you may have. And according to Dr. Stephen Booth, an experienced child abuse pediatrician we consulted on this case, these two steps are crucial to putting the puzzle together. And I looked at the autopsy report again today, and it talked about some notching of the inferior cell rebellum down by the brain stem. So, you know, what you have to ask the ME is, was that a sign of herniation, meaning the brain swelling pushes the brain. down such that it starts oozing and squishing down through the opening at the base of the skull. And the relevance to that was that the cervical spine injury, if it's primarily traumatic, in the M.E's opinion, with which I have no argument, would render the child unable to do like

hardly anything and rapidly die. On the other hand, if that change in the cervical cord is the result of infarction, meaning a cut off of blood supply due to herniation, it can be a downstream result of the trauma from before. Okay, so that's how that fits into the one-hit, two-hit phenomena question. The two steps are not a red herring. It is absolutely the critical issue. To break this down, the reason these steps are so crucial

is that they can tell us if the cervical spine injury observed at autopsy could have been an evolution of one injury or whether it was necessarily a second separate injury. So what I would say at this point, if I had enough knowledge of the case, to have a formal opinion. And just to be clear, I am not satisfied

that I have enough knowledge of this case to venture an opinion that people should really listen to. This is kind of for purpose of discussion. What I would say is that it's highly improbable that that child would have died from an event before those two steps if you give that history credence.

Not impossible. And I can tell you the sequence of events that might allow for that to occur physiologically, you know, but on a percentage likelihood, it's really small, right? So the statistics are such that the probabilities are with the ME if those two steps are valid. And then the probabilities are up in the air. It's not like we can't disprove what the ME is asserting. So those two steps separate, yeah, two opinions, but either one could be true, versus, yeah, two opinions. One could be true, but that's very unlikely, and the other is much more probably true.

The differences in Dr. Sally Smith and Dr. Russell Vegas reports were ultimately minor but important. Both doctors recognized the old and new rib fractures as signs of ongoing abuse. But when it came to the fatal injuries, Dr. Smith's opinion centered on one incident time frame on Friday while John was alone with Nolan, opining that the injuries to Nolan's back, neck, and brain happened all at once and that the spinal cord injuries observed at autopsy were an evolution of those original injuries. And that the spinal cord injury was a herniation caused by brain swelling rather than a discrete injury. This is the phenomenon Dr. Boos is pointing out, and something that has been written about by medical examiners like Dr. Mary Case. Dr. Vega's report points to the fact that the spinal cord at the state of evolution that he observed would have led to quadriplegia and could have led to immediate death.

His report notes that the child was injured at the time the photos and videos were taken, agreeing with Smith's report that some serious injuries had happened in that time frame, when only John was present. But Vega's evaluation leaves space for the possibility of a second injury incident the next morning right before 9-1-1 was called, when both Larry and John were present in the house. But that qualifier of the state of evolution is doing more heavy lifting than I originally realized, because the injury Vega observed, he told me, didn't even really match with an incident right before 911 was called, because Nolan was still breathing when he arrived at the hospital. And then there was trying to track just how compromised Nolan had been after the first injury, since the caregivers were a bit all over the place about what Nolan was able to do in the time between his first seizure on Friday and the second one on Saturday. Child abuse medicine is in many ways, like any other field of pediatric medicine, with one big exception.

When the evidence clearly shows, as it did in Nolan's case, that a child has been abused, you can't put as much stock in the caregiver narrative as you otherwise might, And the dissonance between a caregiver's narrative and the child's injuries can in and of itself be a piece of evidence. Dr. Smith and I talked about John's insistence that Nolan walked, whenever that might have happened. My recollection back at the time was that the supposed walking was before he got to Larry's house. Like when he got up in the morning, then they transported over to Larry's that his mom said that he had. and taken a few steps at when he woke up that morning, which I found hard to believe. John, you know, in his original conversation with the police, which was recorded,

you know, John describes her putting him on the floor, but he couldn't really put weight on his feet and her sort of like propping him up to take a couple steps. So sort of like attempting to walk but not being able to is what it sounds like. Does that sound plausible with Nolan's injuries, sort of to be. moving at all like that? No. I mean, you know, I don't know what. So I've seen a lot of cases where, you know, there's both of the caretakers, whether

it's parents or, you know, boyfriend, girlfriend, whatever. And in describing events prior to that child ending up at the hospital and especially in a situation where it proves to be a fatal brain injury. Within that short time period before, Nolan then was transported to the hospital finally and the condition he was in when he got there, which was essentially dying. The chance that he did something like standing, walking, anything like that in any kind of a coordinated manner, which they seemed to be suggesting that he kind of was upright, not necessarily that somebody held a limp, comatose child in an upright position and said they were standing, but there seemed to be portraying that he was a little

more neurologically intact at that point. The chance that's the case is extremely small. Yeah. I mean, you know, and the accounts sort of shift and vary and mostly, mostly the three of them report him being asleep. Right. And that's usually the, especially if somebody doesn't know that something significant in terms of brain injury has happened to a young child. A coma kind of looks like they're asleep. So lack of responsiveness, depending on a child, sometimes they're hard to wake up. So, you know, I think that perception of the child being asleep is fairly common in the non-offending caretakers. You know, the other thing that we were trying to get to the bottom of was whether or not Nolan ate or drank anything in between the, you know, to sort of throughout that timeline, where we know he was suffering from some kind of catastrophic injury. and it sounds like at most he took in some fluids that he immediately vomited up.

Does that piece sound like it fits with the progression of this injury? It depends again. Sometimes people are portraying sort of a best case scenario of what they observed. Like did somebody pour fluid in his mouth and it kind of drooled out and they're calling that vomiting? I don't know. I think, again, any attempted oral intake within a couple hours of the time that he went to the hospital, I certainly wouldn't expect that it was in any kind of sort of conscious, voluntary kind of a manner. Like actively holding a sippy cup and drinking versus, you know, someone trying to get him to take it.

taking a bunch of sips and being fine and then five minutes later throwing up. As you may know, I recently moved the show out of my basement and into my very own office. And with that, I have been getting back into a routine of properly getting ready for the day. Truthfully, I was not that into makeup when I was younger, but more recently, I have found that it brings me a genuine little spark of joy to do my makeup in the morning. And I am so thrilled to have Thrive Cosmetics as a new sponsor because their liquid lash extensions mascara, is my absolute favorite thing. This mascara is perfect. It is a tubing mascara, so it adds length and volume to your lashes by wrapping around them, but then it also slides off with soap and water. It's really just an incredible product. I have used it for years. Thrive also sent me a lovely little

gift with some of their other products, and they are knocking me out. I've got little kids, so a good night's sleep is never given, but Thrive's brilliant eye brightener, which comes in 32 shades still makes me look like I got one. My other new favorite thing is their empower lip gloss serums. These are ultra glossy, but not sticky or gloopy so your hair won't get caught in them. They go on smoothly and they hydrate your lips. Not only are Thrives' products magical, you can feel good about shopping with Thrive because your purchase will help give back to one of Thrives' more than 600 giving partners. Beauty with a purpose. We love it. So amplify your spring look with Thrive Cosmetics. Go to Thrive,

cosmetics.com slash nobody for an exclusive offer of 20% off your first order. That's Thrive, Cosmetics, C-A-U-S-E-M-E-T-I-C-S dot com slash nobody. You can find that info at the link in our show notes and remember that shopping our sponsors is a great way to support the show. Ah, where are my gloves? Come on, heat and heat. Winter is hard, but your groceries don't have to be. Stay warm. Tap the banner to order your groceries online at voila.ca. Enjoy in-store prices without leaving your home. You'll find the same regular prices online as in-store. Many promotions are available both in-store and online, though some may vary. On December 12th, while Danica was being interviewed for the second time by the police, Nolan remained with the doctors at Johns Hopkins All Children's. Midway through Danica's interview, the detective steps away to see if he can get her an update on Nolan's condition. doctor your son right now is still up there under the care of the doctors but he's currently showing no signs of brain activity while he's still the machines

are still helping him breathe and everything else by definition still alive but his brain at this point is is not working the injuries that they're telling us is the injuries to the brain are are consistent with repeated, basically, blows to the head, along with rib fractures over a course of an extended period of time. Anything that comes to mind that explain these rib fractures, where some of these things could be coming from. Nolan's father, Chris Kelly, was by his side at the hospital,

but because of the circumstances, neither Danica nor Laran, were present. Can I call my dad please? Can you call my dad? Do you know? Do you call me? You don't know. You don't want to bring in here? I don't want to tell him to get the phone.

I don't want to tell him to get the phone. We still need to talk to John again. We talked to him initially, but we still need to talk to him again. Where is your dad now? I'm with my other kids. My other kids. Is he alone with him? Or do you want us to maybe have somebody bring him up here?

A few minutes later, John, who is also there for a follow-up interview, comes back into the room. Did they tell you anything? Nothing. What happened? Fucking Nolan is fucking like brain dead. I'm kidding me? I'm not fucking burying my kid. I need to go outside.

You know, go smoke your cigarette? Yes. At 1148 p.m. on Sunday, December 13th, Nolan Kelly, who had three days earlier been a happy, healthy, 15-month-old little boy, succumbed to his injuries, and was pronounced dead at Johns Hopkins All Children's Hospital. I wish I could tell you more about who Nolan was in his brief life. There are only two photos I could find of him, the one in the Sarasota Herald Tribune and another one from Facebook that was taken about a month before his death. In the latter photo, he has a huge gummy smile. I wish I could have spoken to someone who loved him, but unfortunately I was unable to get in touch with Danica or Larry, though both spoke lovingly of him in their interviews.

Their anguish at his death comes through. It has always troubled me the ways in which Nolan has been mostly erased from the story of his own tragic death, which has instead become a story about doctors rushing to judgment and the Marine who is allegedly wrongfully accused of his murder. What I can tell you about Nolan was that he was a baby with a family who loved him, and three siblings who will be forever marked by his absence. Like every child, Nolan Kelly deserved to be safe in his home.

He deserved to live. Two days after Nolan's death, an autopsy was performed by Dr. Russell Vega, the district's chief medical examiner. This autopsy confirmed that the child had numerous rib fractures at different stages of healing, brain swapsing, swelling, retinal nerve hemorrhages, blood in the chest cavity, as well as spinal fractures slash dislocation and disc laceration. Dr. Vega confirmed that the cause of death was inflicted brain and spinal cord injuries. The manner of death was ruled a homicide. A big part of John's argument is about this spinal cord injury that Dr. Vega identified, and one particular sentence in his two-page autopsy report, where Vega writes that the spinal cord injury alone in the state of

evolution at the time of death would have rendered this child quadriplegic and could have caused death rapidly. The thinking goes, therefore, that the injuries Nolan was exhibiting symptoms of in the 24-hour period before the 911 call, the seizures, the lethargy, and the vomiting, could not have been responsible for his death because he wouldn't have lived an additional 24 hours after the spinal cord injury observed by the medical examiner. Here's Dr. Vega going into a bit more detail about Nolan's injuries. So the other injuries fall into three other major categories. One is in the neck.

And it could be that the injury in the neck is reflective of the same mechanisms that caused injury in the head that may have been from exactly the same event or mechanism. But what I found in the neck was that the neck was sprained, meaning that there was hemorrhage in the neck muscles and ligaments. and that there was a very severe injury to the spinal cord, very high up in the neck, at the very top of the cervical spinal cord. And you know you probably know that spinal cord injuries anywhere are devastating

because they cause essentially loss of motor and sensory function to everything below the level at which the injury occurs. When you have a high cervical injury, that means that everything below that, its movement of the arms, the legs, everything, including breathing, is going to be severely compromised or completely cut off. And his injury and the severity of it were high enough that that would have been my expectation, that it would have made him what we would call a complete quadriplegic. unable to move any of extremities, unable to feel anything below that level of his neck, and unable to breathe. Yeah, so that was where, you know,

the timeline seems to really come into play because it was your opinion that the injury that you saw must have, yeah, rendered him, you know, quadriplegic right away. So then when we're looking at the sort of timeline, So it sort of must have happened in a pretty brief time period before the grandfather, who was, you know, one of the adults that was with him that morning, called 911, and then he ends up being taken to the hospital. And yeah, that's my understanding of that.

And then in terms of, you said there was a third. So we have the brain injuries and then the injury to the spinal cord. And then what was the third category? Well, I would like to go back to the neck injury if you don't mind. Yes, please. So in the vast majority of instances, I would agree with you that my instinct of how to interpret this finding would be that it must have occurred right before he received care. Because with the spinal cord, at least in the condition it was in that when he died, which is the condition it was in essentially when I got a chance to examine it, he wouldn't have been able to breathe.

And if you can't breathe, you don't survive long at all. You have a few minutes of non-breathing before you get irreversible brain damage and you will be essentially dead on site. So if this injury had occurred and been as severe as it was when I saw it at the time of the autopsy, even if it occurred when he was, you know, right before he was, quote, unquote, found on the floor by the grandfather. That's still several minutes that he would have had to survive without breathing before resuscitation attempts were, would have been ensuing there. The pieces of the puzzle just weren't matching up in this case. There were so many questions, not like.

least of which, why none of the adults who'd seen Nolan after his first seizure, while he was obviously declining, had sought medical attention for the boy. Dr. Sally Smith calls this out in her report, where she points out that neither John nor Danica appear to be able to provide a safe home for the surviving children in this family, and she expresses concerns about Larry's protectiveness as well. And Larry was about to throw investigators a huge curveball. So what's going on? Take up every thing I told y'all what happened last Saturday. As far as I can recall, it's the absolute truth.

Exception, I let something out. That's next time on Nobody Should Believe Me. Nobody Should Believe Me is written, reported, and executive produced by me, Andrea Dunlop. Our co-executive producer is Mariah Gossett. Our editor is Greta Stromquist, story editing by Nicole Hill. Research and fact-checking by Aaron Ajai. Research by Jessa V. Randall. Mixing and engineering by Robin Edgar.

Our production manager is Nola Carmuch. Music from Blue Dot Sessions, sound snap, and slipstream.