In a barely audible voice, Dino Pavlis described Thursday how the dream of adopting two Russian children became a horror story, unfolding in his 900-square-foot Schaumburg apartment and ending with the 6-year-old boy’s death.
He and his wife, Irma, 33, had traveled to Russia twice before their adoption of Alex and his younger sister became final. The challenges became evident even before the couple left the country.
“When Alex was with us, he would shake his arms,” Dino Pavlis said. “He would yell and scream for no apparent reason. He banged his head on the floor.”
The night the Pavlises arrived home from Russia, Alex threw himself down in the apartment complex parking lot, crying and shrieking loudly.
Dino Pavlis, 41, testified in his wife’s defense Thursday in the Rolling Meadows branch of Cook County Circuit Court, where Irma Pavlis is on trial, accused of killing Alex by beating him repeatedly in December 2003.
For several seconds, Irma Pavlis locked eyes with her husband as he walked into the courtroom Thursday afternoon to testify. By the time her husband was seated in the witness stand, Irma Pavlis was weeping softly, with her head burrowed in her left hand.
Then Dino Pavlis told jurors about the couple’s first days with Alex, when they discovered unexpected physical deformities. They noticed that one little finger was curved and two center toes on both feet were connected.
A pediatrician later testified that such deformities, as well as Alex’s facial features, are consistent with fetal alcohol syndrome.
Irma Pavlis’ attorney has told the jury that Alex caused many of the bruises, and that while his client disciplined Alex, she did not cause his death.
In Russia, Alex used the bathroom. But in the U.S., Dino Pavlis said, the boy urinated and defecated on himself. He often banged his head on the apartment walls and the floor. He shifted between periods of calmness and extreme energy. Sometimes, Dino Pavlis said, the couple could trace Alex’s outbursts to anger, but other times they couldn’t make sense of his behavior or its cause.
Amid it all, the boy and his adoptive mother struggled to communicate. She knew only a few phrases in Russian. He had learned to respond to only the most simple commands such as “come here” and “eat.”
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Dino Pavlis estimated his son showed behavioral problems about half the time, but he couldn’t be certain. He left for his Chicago job around 5:30 a.m. and didn’t come home until 6 p.m., he said. Irma Pavlis cared for the children alone.
“It was very stressful,” Dino Pavlis said of the work his wife undertook. “She was very tired, and it was non-stop, and I wasn’t able to help her very much.”
When Dino Pavlis called home during his workdays, Irma Pavlis detailed her struggles to feed the children, keep the house clean and cope with Alex’s behavior. He said eventually he and Irma spanked the children with open hands on their bottoms.
He conceded that he knew that was not allowed under their status as adoptive parents. But he said he never saw his wife do anything more physical to the children.
Thursday morning, as jurors watched a videotaped recording of Irma Pavlis confessing to police that she repeatedly beat her son in the days before his death, she wept and kept her head bowed. She consented to the videotaped confession while she was in custody at the Schaumburg Police Department, two days after her son died Dec. 19, 2003, of blunt head trauma.
Several times during the roughly 30-minute video, Irma Pavlis used her hands to demonstrate how she struck the boy.
“I hit him in the head. It was hard,” she told police and Assistant State’s Atty. Cathy Nauheimer, who conducted the interview. “I slapped him again in the face. I punched him in the stomach,” and closed her fist to demonstrate the punch.
Dr. Ira Chasnoff, a Chicago pediatrician and president of the Children’s Research Triangle, which specializes in health and psychiatric care for internationally adopted children, testified that “you can see a progression of danger.”
“It’s clear she was highly stressed and isolated so as Alex’s behavior escalated, her behavior escalated,” Chasnoff said.
Irma Pavlis’ behavior follows a pattern, what Chasnoff testified was a “vicious cycle” that he and his associates have documented between the adoptive parents of Russian children and those children.
Chasnoff said the boy showed all the classic signs of children with fetal alcohol syndrome as well as post-traumatic stress disorder.
Dr. Shaku Teas, a forensic pathologist and former deputy medical examiner for Cook County for 14 years, said Alex’s behavior and self-inflicted injuries may have led to his death. She said she found evidence of a prior subdural hematoma, or bleeding on a part of the brain, that may have caused his death. She said areas of the brain showed bleeding as old as 15 to 17 days.
Dino Pavlis acknowledged that the couple never took Alex to a doctor. They had scheduled a doctor’s appointment for Alex in November, but the child did not see a doctor until Dec. 18, when Schaumburg firefighters responded to Irma Pavlis’ 911 call that her son was not breathing.
The trial continues Friday.