Man convicted of killing toddler

Associated Press

THERMOPOLIS, Wyo. -- A jury on Saturday found Andrew Yellowbear Jr. guilty of first-degree murder in the death of his 22-month-old daughter.

Jurors began deliberating Wednesday and returned the verdict at about 2 p.m. Saturday, said Linda Harris, clerk of the 5th Judicial District Court.

The jury will meet again Monday to consider whether to impose the death penalty against Yellowbear, Harris said.

Marcela Hope Yellowbear was pronounced dead at a Riverton emergency room in July 2004 after her mother, Macalia Blackburn, took her in with a variety of injuries including broken bones, severe burns and cuts and bruises to most of her body.

While Yellowbear told investigators that Blackburn perpetrated the abuse against the girl, Blackburn said Yellowbear did it.

Blackburn initially was charged with Marcela's murder but pleaded guilty to being an accessory in exchange for her cooperation in the case against Yellowbear.

During Yellowbear's two-week trial, a pathologist testifying for the defense said Marcela didn't die of the prolonged abuse, but suffocated when she was hung from a closet rod by looping a strap through two front belt loops in her suspenders.

In a videotape played for jurors, Yellowbear told detectives that he had left home for about an hour, then returned and found Blackburn playing solitaire in the kitchen.

He said on the tape that he found his daughter unconscious and suspended in the bedroom closet. He said he took her down and tried to revive her but couldn't.

Yellowbear throughout the video mentioned different acts of abuse he said Blackburn told him she'd committed. Yellowbear, however, said he never saw Blackburn abuse Marcela.

Blackburn testified that she saw Yellowbear commit horrible abuse, saying he once held a lighter to Marcela's foot, among other things.

Before trial, prosecutors had offered Yellowbear the opportunity to plead guilty to second-degree murder, which is punishable by 20 years to life in prison. Yellowbear refused.

"I choose to go to trial on this matter," Yellowbear said weeks before trial. "I didn't do anything to my daughter. I think the record shows that."

Fremont County Attorney Ed Newell filed documents in court in April 2005 saying Yellowbear should face the death penalty for the girl's death.

Among factors that indicated the death penalty was appropriate, Newell stated that the girl's death was "especially atrocious or cruel, being unnecessarily torturous to the victim."

Newell noted that Marcela was under the age of 17, and said she was "especially vulnerable due to physical disability."

The trial was held in Hot Springs County. Yellowbear is a member of the Northern Arapaho Tribe, and his attorneys argued that it would be difficult to find an unbiased jury in Fremont County, where Yellowbear would face anti-Indian bias from whites and intertribal bias from Eastern Shoshone.

The two tribes share the Wind River Indian Reservation.