This is Part 3 of a Moral Quandary. Click here to read Part 1.

Francesco Caruso was a stocky man with a square face and large powerful hands. He climbed on the witness stand and looked at his attorney apprehensively.

His wife was in the building but she was walking the corridors outside the courtroom, soothing their infant daughter. Strangely enough, the doctor’s widow was also walking the corridors with her baby daughter in her arms.

Reporters noticed them and reported on the differences between them. Marie Caruso was “short, nervous, and under-nourished” while Helen Pendola was “tall, slender and stern.” They must not have spoken to each other or the papers would have surely captured their words.

In the courtroom, Caruso immediately denied he had any plans to kill Dr. Pendola. He wept as he described the death of “Little Jole.”

As he related the story of the death of his “little Jole” Caruso wept several times.

Dr. Pendola attended the boy on Saturday, injected an anti-toxin, and promised to return the next day. “I stayed up all night,” Caruso testied. “At 4 o’clock Jole looked crazy. ‘My insides burn; I’m a-going to die, papa,’ he said.”

He had picked the child up and paced the floor helplessly until little Joe said, “Goodbye papa, I’m going away.”

Caruso sat by his son’s body and wept until Dr. Pendola arrived. The doctor was not sympathetic.

“He laughed, ‘ha ha,'” Caruso declared, “and then he said, ‘you mustn’t believe everything from last night—you must forget that thing from last night.’  I grab the doctor’s neck. He say, ‘Don’ blame me, Mr. Caruso, it’s the drugstore man’s fault. I gon’ fix you everthing.’ I told him, ‘You don’t have to fix me! You fixed my child!'”

“He punched me in the mouth and I let go. I grabbed him by the neck again and pushed him on the bed.”

Dr. Pendola pleaded with Caruso: the boy died because the druggist made a mistake. But Caruso kept choking him.

His vivid description of the strangling and stabbing of the doctor brought half suppressed gasps from the Pendola family, seated together in the courtroom.

“In that time I don’t know myself what I’m gonna do to that doctor; I knock him down to the floor, choke him on the floor. I take knife, just sticka knife in here,” Caruso said, gesturing to his own throat.

“Did you intend to kill the doctor?” asked George Voss, Caruso’s attorney.

“No. I no intend kill him. If I want to kill the doctor that time, I kill him; know what I mean?”

DA Gallagher cross-examined Caruso. “Did you kill the doctor because he Iaughed or because you thought he killed your child?” he asked.

“I don’t what I had in my mind,” answered Caruso. “I think I kill him….He kill my Joe, I kill him,” Not seeing the frantic signaling from his attorneys, Caruso added, “I am sorry now, though. I was mad, crazy, when I did it.”

Before closing his case, the District Attorney, read from Francesco’s confession from the night of his arrest.

In the statement, Caruso said that his six-year-old son, Joseph, cried for an hour after Dr. Pendola injected him with anti-toxin. “The next day I called an ambulance from Holy Family Hospital,” Caruso’s statement read. The Holy Family surgeon pronounced the child dead. “Then Dr. Pendola came. I met him at the door. ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked when he saw me.”

“’The child is dead.’ I said.

“He laughed and say, ‘I can’t help that. Where is the child?’”

“I told him the child is in the bedroom.” But that wasn’t true. The boy’s body was on a cot in the kitchen.

“When Dr. Pendola entered the bedroom, I grabbed his throat with my left hand. I choked him. He became limp and I threw him to the floor. Then I rushed into the kitchen closet for the bread knife.”

Dr. Pendola tried to strike him. “I was too strong for him. He asked me to stop. I told him that because my child is dead he would have to die too.”

“Did you tell your wife what you did?” an officer asked.

“I didn’t have to tell my wife. She saw.”

Another officer questioned Caruso. “Did you have anything to drink before you killed the doctor?”

“With my child dying, how could I drink?”

When the defense’s turn for closing arguments came, there was little they could say. Caruso’s statements had left no room for doubt. He had admittedly killed the doctor. He had an erroneous belief Dr. Pendola had poisoned his son, defense attorney George Voss said, but this had nothing to do with his client’s state of mind. Caruso loved his son and when Little Joe died, he snapped. “This is no murder in the first degree,” Voss reiterated.

As part of his closing argument, Gallagher waved the blood-stained bread knife. The defense objected but Gallagher knew the theatrical value of such a gesture. He wanted that picture in the jury’s mind. At last Judge McLaughlin charged the jury. Court officers shepherded the jurors from the room to begin their deliberations.

Big twists in this story are coming! Go to Part 4