A jury found a Bourg woman responsible for serious injuries to a four-year-old child in her care.
A jury deliberated for nearly two hours after a three-day trial and found Jasmine Bouvier guilty on two counts of second-degree cruelty to a juvenile. She now faces a maximum sentence of 80 years at hard labor.
Prosecutor Jason Chatagnier with the Lafourche Parish District Attorney’s Office represented the state, and he was joined by fellow prosecutor Greg Stahlnecker. Bouvier was represented by defense attorney Theresa King.
Bouvier and her boyfriend, Dustin Naquin, were both arrested in 2019 after Naquin’s biological son was rushed to the hospital in critical condition with injuries that resembled a pattern of abuse. According to Naquin’s testimony, before the child was rushed to the hospital, he came home to find the boy naked, unresponsive and on the couch with nothing but a white sheet draped over him.
The child had a broken arm, a fractured pelvis, bruising across his entire body including genitals, a deep wound in his left buttocks, and a concussion that required his skull to be opened up to allow his brain’s swelling to go down.
The boy survived and is in the care of a new guardian, thanks to medical intervention.
“Ladies and gentlemen, they don’t do brain surgery unless they think you are going to die. These injuries, they were not accidental,” Chatagnier said. “She has to be held accountable for her actions and inactions.”
Images of the severe injuries the child sustained caused visible reactions in the jurors as well as those who testified. The images caused Naquin, who previously pled guilty to both counts in February 2022, to close his eyes and turn away.
King argued that Naquin carried out the beatings and that Bouvier lacked the confidence to stand up to Dustin and protect the child. She said Bouvier lived through a history of abusive men in her life and lost the ability to defend herself or others.
“She was not the cruel person in [the child’s] life, Dustin was and has pled guilty,” King said. “She is not a monster. She did not cause or inflict serious bodily injury… Dustin was the source, not just the cause, of not only mental but also the physical injuries.”
During the second day of the trial Naquin, in handcuffs, was called to the stand by the defense. He was questioned about how he disciplined the child, and maintained that he was never violent until one instance where he taped paint sticks together to whip the child on his bottom.
He was shown his work schedule which consisted most days of going to work for 12-hour shifts. During this time he said he had a friend drive him to work, which left the couple’s vehicle at home and available for Bouvier who looked after the child. Chatagnier continued to raise this point to demonstrate that each time the boy had an injury, like the broken arm, or the concussion, Bouvier appears to have had the means to bring the child to the hospital but didn’t.
He also presented video and text message evidence that showed Bouvier bragging about “busting his ass.”
The defense argued that the broken arm came from the child falling out of a moving vehicle and that the concussion either came from that fall, or from slipping and hitting his head on a washing machine.
When Bouvier testified she said she didn’t take the child to the hospital out of fear of Naquin. King argued that Bouvier did what she could to care for and clean the wound on his bottom, which bled so much it required constant changing of his underwear.
During his closing argument Chatagnier held images of the abused and hospitalized child in front of jurors and reminded them that any reasonable person would take a child to get medical care for such visceral injuries. He said Bouvier didn’t because she’d suddenly have to answer uncomfortable questions about child abuse. If she was really caring for the child, Chatagnier said, she would have taken him.
“You don’t even have to stick around. Just drop him off, then at least he has medical care,” he said. Instead, Chatagnier argued, she waited until he was dying to call someone else, “That’s why she does make that phone call, because he was near death and if he dies that’s a murder charge.”