The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
NOVEMBER 2011 · AFFIRMED 27 JUNE 2013
Terry L. Sturgis Sr. lived, with five of his children, in the basement of his mother's South Bend home. On the evening of 3 November 2011, over a period of hours, he beat his sons. His ten-year-old son, Tramelle Sturgis, died in the early hours of 4 November 2011; the pathologist's finding, as the Court of Appeals states it, was death by blunt force trauma, primarily to the head. This entry states the course of the crime at the level the record requires and no further; the opinion's fuller account is a public document, and it is cited below for any reader who needs it.
A jury convicted Sturgis on all counts: murder; two counts of criminal confinement; eight counts of battery; and two counts of neglect of a dependent. The trial court merged one count into the murder conviction and reduced the neglect convictions on double-jeopardy grounds, and imposed an aggregate sentence of 140 years. The Court of Appeals affirmed the convictions and the sentence in full — Sturgis v. State, No. 71A03-1207-CR-330, an opinion for publication issued 27 June 2013. The case's second defendant was the children's grandmother, Dellia Castile, in whose home the family lived: she was charged with child neglect for failing to protect the children, and she was convicted — the Tribune's account of her conviction states that she knew of the abuse and did not report it — and was in prison for it; her exact sentence is not established in the sources reached for this history. The case also left a record of the system's failure before it reached a courtroom: the Tribune's reporters Virginia Black and Mary Kate Malone obtained the recording of a call to the state's child-abuse hotline that had pleaded for help for Tramelle and had not saved him, and that reporting was honored in the state journalism awards of 2012.
Sources:
- Sturgis v. State, No. 71A03-1207-CR-330 (Ind. Ct. App. 27 June 2013), opinion for publication — read first-hand
- South Bend Tribune, “A question of what went wrong with boy” (2011) — the charge against Dellia Castile; and the Tribune's 2012 awards coverage — her conviction and the hotline reporting