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Autopsy results confirm heat caused Devin Gibson’s death
By Lynn Hotaling
Official autopsy results have confirmed that hyperthermia, or excessive heating, caused the May 22 death of 8-year-old Devin Miles Gibson.
Performed by Dr. Amy Tharp of the Wake Forest University School of Medicine’s pathology department, the autopsy reveals that Gibson was a “perfectly healthy little boy” prior to being confined to a hot car in the Mountain Trace Nursing Center parking lot on the day of his death, Tharp said.
According to Tharp, the autopsy did not show anything that could be called child abuse.
“He had a couple of bruises and scrapes, and it’s hard to tell with an 8-year-old where they might have come from,” Tharp said. “But there were no old fractures and nothing that could be called a pattern of abuse.”
Toxicology results indicated trace amounts of Ritalin, a drug typically used to treat attention-deficit disorder, Tharp said.
A Jackson County Grand Jury July 5 indicted Devin Gibson’s mother, Michelle Gibson of Asheville on charges of second-degree murder and felony child abuse in connection with her son’s death.
District Court Judge Brad Letts ruled June 5 that there was sufficient evidence to charge the 36-year-old Asheville woman. The boy died in Gibson’s 1990 Ford Escort, which was parked at Mountain Trace while Gibson worked a 16-hour shift. Preliminary autopsy results indicated Devin’s death was the result of being confined to the vehicle on a hot day.
Gibson was arrested May 22 in Asheville and has been jailed in lieu of a $100,000 bond in the Jackson County Detention Center since that time.
According to testimony during the June 5 probable cause hearing, Gibson had placed Devin in the Escort’s trunk at about 5 a.m. before she and a co-worker, Alesia Adorno, drove from Asheville to Mountain Trace both Saturday and Sunday, May 21 and 22. The testimony was from Detective Patrick McCoy of the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office, who interviewed Gibson and took a statement from her the morning after her son died.
Gibson told McCoy that she had checked on Devin at about 8:30 a.m. and again at 11:30 a.m. when she drove to Burger King to buy lunch. She and Devin talked on the way to the restaurant, she said, and Devin ate a cheeseburger children’s meal. The back seat was pushed down during the trip, but she pushed it back up upon parking the car at Mountain Trace. According to the statement, Devin was OK when Gibson checked on him around 2:30 p.m. but he had complained of being hot.
When she went back to the car between 3 and 3:30 p.m., she found Devin unresponsive and performed CPR, but she did not get a response, the statement said. Gibson remained in the car for about 30 minutes before going inside to tell Adorno what had happened.
Adorno accompanied Gibson to the car and urged her to take the boy to Harris Regional Hospital, but Gibson refused, saying she had to take her son back to Asheville. Adorno summoned local authorities who arrived at Mountain Trace to find that Gibson had left with the boy’s body.
She was later located outside her Asheville apartment complex and was in her car holding Devin when police arrived.
Her case could come to trial later this year, though a date has not yet been set.
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