Inconsistencies in timing of King Owusu's injuries triggered homicide investigation, detective tells jury
Former Suffolk Police homicide Det. Patrick Portela arrives in Suffolk County Court in Riverhead on Monday. Credit: James Carbone
The death of a 5-year-old boy became a homicide investigation after the Suffolk County Medical Examiner's Office determined the injuries he suffered occurred much later than his mother and her boyfriend had told a detective, the lead investigator testified at the couple's murder trial Monday.
Since-retired Suffolk police Det. Patrick Portela told the jury an autopsy revealed King Owusu was injured within two to three days of his 2021 death and not weeks earlier while visiting his father in Ghana, as he said the defendants initially indicated.
“The Ghana story was just that, a story,” Portela testified before acting Suffolk Supreme Court Justice Steven Pilewski in Riverhead. “There's no way those injuries could have happened three weeks before, when they said they happened.”
The testimony came at the start of the third and likely final week of the second-degree depraved indifference murder trial of Valerie Owusu and Emmanuel Addae, both 28, of Corona, Queens. The case is being tried in Suffolk County because King died after being brought to Addae's parents' apartment in Brentwood on April 1, 2021.
Portela spent much of Monday testifying to his findings within the first 48 hours after King’s death, when the detective said he questioned Owusu and Addae and then discovered several inaccuracies in their stories.
In addition to the timing of the injuries, Portela said both defendants told him they returned from Ghana sooner than a customs official and Kennedy Airport surveillance footage would later reveal they did. The couple also provided separate addresses, neither of which was the LeFrak City apartment where they lived together with King and their infant daughter, Portela said.
“I handed her a ‘permission to search form’ and she wrote the address 97-15 Horace Harding Expy.,” Portela said of Owusu. “It was different from the address that she originally supplied.”
When Portela and other Suffolk investigators arrived at the apartment for an initial walk-through in the overnight hours after King’s death, they spotted several broken sticks and a belt, which prosecutors have alleged were used in the beating that caused the boy’s death.
When detectives returned with a search warrant a day later, they found the apartment had been cleaned and smelled of bleach, Portela said during direct examination from Assistant Suffolk County District Attorney Elena Tomaro.
Photos taken by investigators on the two visits to the apartment showed an air mattress that was initially on the floor of the bedroom where King slept had been folded up and placed under a bed. When investigators opened the mattress back up they found it had also been stained with bleach.
Owusu and Addae, who Portela said described himself to investigators as King’s “stepfather,” were arrested in April 2022, a year after the child’s death. Prosecutors allege King was beaten by his mother and Addae in the apartment on March 30, 2021. A next-door neighbor heard “banging and whipping noises” through a wall that divides their units, Tomaro said during her opening argument March 5.
King suffered more than 100 cuts and bruises “from the top of his head to the bottom of his feet” due to repeated blows from the objects located in the apartment, Tomaro said, adding that he was also “punched, slapped and thrown into furniture and the wall.”
King, who was 3 feet, 6 inches tall and weighed 49 pounds, had internal bleeding and tissue injuries and suffered lung and brain damage, leading to his death, the prosecutor said.
Addae’s defense attorney, Raymond Baierlein, of Bay Shore, and Owusu’s attorney, Rene Myatt, of Queens, have said prosecutors lacked sufficient evidence to charge their clients.
Grant Parpan covers Suffolk County courts and federal courts for Newsday. A Long Island native, he joined Newsday in 2022.
