AUBURN – Only one juror was convinced that Sarah Allen should not be convicted of manslaughter in the death of her son.

According to another juror in the case, the final vote was 11-1 to find Allen guilty of shaking her adopted son to death on Feb. 14, 2003. A unanimous vote would have been necessary for a verdict.

The second juror said the sole vote to acquit Allen came from a female juror who announced at 10 a.m. Wednesday that she had made up her mind and no longer wanted to discuss her reasons.

“She completely shut down,” said Rachel LeBel, one of the 12 jurors assigned to the case. “We kept asking her to support her argument, but all she would say is, I have reasonable doubt. I’m not going talk about it anymore.'”

Still, the other jurors persisted.

It wasn’t until 11 a.m. Thursday, after 18 hours of deliberations, that the panel of six men and six women sent their final note, letting Justice Ellen Gorman know that they were deadlocked. Gorman declared a mistrial, and Allen, 30, was released to await the state’s decision on whether to hold another trial.

“We felt justice hadn’t been done to that child,” said LeBel, who is 39 and the manager of a local customer service department.

First vote

According to LeBel, the jurors took their first vote Monday afternoon as soon as they were sent to the deliberating room. At that point, they were split 8-4.

LeBel was one of the four jurors who initially thought the defense proved reasonable doubt of Allen’s guilt.

She changed her mind after the jurors read the testimony of two doctors who treated Nathaniel Allen and again watched a video that police took of Allen re-enacting what she says happened on the night the boy was rushed to the hospital.

The video was taken at Allen’s home in Lisbon Falls while Nathaniel was still on life support. In LeBel’s opinion, Allen was trying to explain too much to the detectives and didn’t show signs of a distressed mother.

“The evidence was just overwhelming,” LeBel said. “The fact that the child had no bumps, no localized injuries, we spent a lot of time talking about that.”

A terrible mistake’

Allen called 911 at about 10 p.m. that Valentine’s Day, screaming that her 21-month-son was unconscious and that she thought he broke his neck. Allen’s husband, Jeremy, was away on a business trip at the time.

Allen later told investigators that the boy had fallen repeatedly in the tub, then in his bedroom.

All the doctors who treated Nathaniel testified that the falls could not have caused the bleeding in his brain, neck and eyes. They agreed that the most likely cause was a violent shaking or jerking motion.

According to LeBel, most of the jurors did not see Allen as a terrible person.

“We felt that Sarah Allen made a terrible mistake. She was a good mother. She loved her baby a lot. But, in just a moment, something happened and she snapped,” LeBel said.

She said the juror who voted to acquit seemed most convinced by the testimony of Dr. Suzanne de la Monte, a neuropatholgist who teaches at Brown University and was hired by Allen’s lawyer to examine Nathaniel’s brain.

De la Monte testified on the last day of the trial that her study of the boy’s brain did not reveal any of the torn neurons expected in a shaking incident. She suggested that the boy could have had an undiagnosed brain disorder that caused him to fall and eventually caused his death.

No obligation

Early Thursday, the jurors sent a note to Justice Gorman to let her know that only one juror disagreed with the others and was refusing to talk.

After receiving the note, Gorman called the jurors into the courtroom and told them that they were under no obligation to talk about the reasons for voting one way or the other. They simply had to vote, she said.

Then she sent them back to the deliberating room.

“Five minutes later, we were like, Forget it,'” LeBel said.

She was one of three jurors who was crying when they entered the courtroom for the last time to declare that they were hopelessly deadlocked.

“The tears were more out of frustration,” she said. “I felt that we didn’t accomplish our duty.”

After the trial was over, LeBel said, Gorman spent an hour talking with the jurors. LeBel felt better after the judge assured them that they had done their job and had done it well.

The decision of whether to prosecute the case again rests with the Attorney General’s Office. Assistant Attorney General Lisa Marchese said Thursday that she plans to push for a new trial.

If a new trial is held, it will probably be in a different county where potential jurors are less likely to have seen or read media coverage of the case.

[email protected]