
Minnesota Jury Acquits Dad After Toddler’s Fatal Window Fall
Brooklyn Park, MN (KROC-AM News) - A Texas man has been acquitted of manslaughter in connection with the death of his young son.
The second-degree manslaughter charge was filed in Hennepin County Court last September against 30-year-old Salleban Abdullahi Duale. It alleged the death of his three-year-old son was due to child neglect or endangerment.
According to the criminal complaint, Brooklyn Park police officers responded to an apartment complex in the Twin Cities suburb on May 18 after receiving a report of a child who had fallen out of a window. When they arrived, the officers reported finding a child, who appeared to have suffered life-threatening injuries and was pronounced dead at the scene.
The court document indicates officers then spoke to the young boy's father, who stated that he had been staying at his brother’s apartment with his children. The investigators reported that Duale told them he was watching TV with his children, and after he walked out of the living room, his son fell from the eighth floor window.

The charges described how the officers went to the apartment and saw that a coach was "backed up immediately to the window from which the victim fell." The criminal complaint also says that Duale told the officers his son was sitting on the back of the couch in front of the open window immediately before he plunged to his death.
The criminal complaint included the findings of interviews conducted by child protection investigators with the victim's siblings. The oldest was nine years old and told investigators that Duale was lying on a bed in the bedroom and was not in the living room when the little boy was pushing on the window screen before he fell.
The child protection investigators were also told, by another sibling, that Duale was on the phone all day and that he never saw his father in the living room or kitchen on the morning of the tragic incident.
The case went to trial last week in Hennepin County Court and resulted in a not guilty verdict.
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