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Mother’s boyfriend charged in toddler’s death

Published Friday, September 19, 2008 8:53 AM

By David Berman
Summerville Journal Scene ®

Police responded Monday to a Summerville home where they found a 22-month-old boy’s lifeless body — cold, stiff and covered in blood, a report shows.

Detectives labeled the boy’s death “suspicious,” and on Wednesday afternoon, they arrested Justin Hillerby, the live-in boyfriend of the child’s mother, on a charge of homicide by child abuse, Summerville police Capt. Jon Rogers said.

The boy — identified as Blaise Preston Spoerl by an obituary sent to the Journal Scene — was found in his crib at his 402 Dovetail Circle home in the Weatherstone subdivision.

According to an arrest affidavit, Hillerby told investigators he struck the child in the head “hard enough” with his knee, throwing him headfirst to the floor.

Hillerby said that after striking him, he told the moaning child to get up and “walk it off,” the affidavit says.

The boy wobbled to a seat, looking like a “zombie,” Hillerby told police.

Contrary to verbal and written statements Hillerby would later provide to police, on Monday he told officers that the boy was falling asleep in the highchair so he put him to bed, an incident report shows.

According to the affidavit, after being placed in his highchair, the boy’s head “began to sway back and forth as if he had no muscle control.”

Hillerby described removing the boy from the highchair and carrying him into his bedroom, along the way hitting the boy’s head against the doorframe and against the crib, the affidavit says.

Hillerby didn’t seek check on the boy or seek medical attention for him for approximately 12 hours, the affidavit says.

The next morning, Jennifer Spoerl found her son in his crib, lying on his back with a pool of blood near his body, the incident report says.

Police on Wednesday released a recording of the call to 911. The male caller, presumably Hillerby, refers to the boy as his stepson.

With audible crying and screaming in the background, he says: “He has blood all over his face and he’s stiff as a board. He’s (expletive deleted) dead.”

Police spoke with two roommates who live with Hillerby and Jennifer Spoerl. One roommate, Brandi Mihill, said Blaise was crying when she returned home, the report says.

Mihill said Hillerby told her he put Blaise in the corner because he knocked over his beer, the report says.

According to Mihill, Jennifer Spoerl returned home intoxicated about 1:40 a.m., Monday. She went into Mihill’s room “fussing about late rent” and then everyone went to bed, the report says.

As a precautionary measure, Blaise’s eight-year-old sister was placed into protective custody until investigators determine how the 22-month-old died, Rogers said.

A pathologist at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston performed the autopsy, listing Spoerl’s cause of death as blunt trauma to the head and the manner of death as homicide, the affidavit says.

Contact David Berman at 873-9424 ext. 214 or dberman@journalscene.com

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