Lamoy and Joseph Andressohn, the Homestead couple charged with starving their infant daughter to death on a raw-foods diet, saw their two sons Wednesday for the first time in almost three years.
The boys were bubbly, talkative and impatient, and they were testifying against their parents in a manslaughter trial.
Woyah Andressohn, age 5 months, died in May 2003, weighing less than 7 pounds -- half of what a baby her age normally weighs.
The boys -- whose names The Herald has decided not to print -- are 9 and 7. They testified on closed-circuit television from the judge's chambers and never heard or saw their parents.
The older son, in a white dress shirt and floppily outsized jacket, said math was his favorite subject at school and roast potatoes and tacos his favorite foods at Aunt Mary's house. The prosecutor soon directed him to grimmer matters: enemas, hunger and fear of asking his father for more food ``because I don't want to make him mad.''
He remembered his little sister, he said. ``Yeah. She died.''
How? The prosecutor asked.
``Because they gave her vegetables. They didn't give her milk.''
It was a strangely pointed -- if plainly poignant -- answer for a child to give, echoed later that afternoon when his younger brother took the stand. How did your little sister die? asked the prosecutor.
''They gave her too much raw food,'' said the boy.
The Andressohns listened to this and said nothing. Joseph, 36, sat impassively, sometimes putting a hand on his wife's back. Lamoy, 29, dabbed her eyes with a red bandanna.
If defense attorney Ellis Rubin hoped to show their sons' answers were suspect -- designed and coached, even false -- he did so in a labored, uncertain way.
Do you like Herbert Walker, the prosecutor? You spent a lot of time with him, didn't you?
Yes, said the older boy. He's my friend, but so are you.
Did Aunt Mary talk to you about seeing your parents?
Yes, said the boy -- she said he would have to go to jail, too, if he went to visit. But Rubin never established if the boy took this as a threat or just statement of fact.
And no, the boy didn't know who'd told him his sister was dead, or why.
''All I know is, they killed my sister by accident,'' he said. ``It wasn't on purpose. It was an accident.''
Then the cross-examination took a strange and sad turn.
All afternoon the defense had been trying to tell the story of a loving, happy family, probing the boys' memories about Disney World, the toy store, a Spiderman movie, trips they didn't necessarily remember.
''Do you love your Mommy?'' Rubin now asked the older boy.
''Until I noticed that my baby sister was dead,'' said the math student. ``Then I loved her three quarters, not the last one.''
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