Police officers and first responders testified during the second day of trial for Kouri Richins, a mom who wrote a children’s book about grief featuring her family before being charged with fatally poisoning her husband.
Following opening statements and testimony from Eric Richins’ family members on Monday, Summit County sheriff’s deputy Vincent Nguyen testified about responding to the home the night Eric Richins died. In his body camera footage, which was shown to the jury. In it, Kouri Richins is standing with her hands on either side of her head in the doorway to the master bathroom, watching as emergency responders attempt to revive her husband.
After leaving the room, he asks Richins questions about what happened that night and Eric Richins’ medical history. After giving a few details, including where their sons are in the home and that he had felt “cold,” Kouri Richins said through tears, “I need to call his dad, he’s going to be OK, right?”
When asked about issues with his health, she mentioned Lyme disease and that he sometimes took a THC gummy before bed, but she didn’t think he had. She also said he mentioned something about chest pain before bed. Although she was sleeping in another room with their son, Richins said in the video that she would have heard any yell and that her husband hadn’t made a sound.
“He was active, he didn’t just die in his sleep, this is insane,” Richins said.
Her mom, Lisa Darden, got to the home first and told Richins that her sons knew their dad had died, and that they had heard it from a cop. She said she needed to talk to her kids, and her mom said she had already spoken to them and told them to go back to sleep.
Nguyen’s testimony was joined on Tuesday by testimony from another officer who responded and searched for, but did not find THC gummies, an evidence technician with the Office of the Medical Examiner, the EMT who arrived and tried to revive Eric Richins, the woman who performed the autopsy on Eric Richins and others.
Richins’ attorneys focused on what might have been missed during the examination, pointing out areas the body cameras didn’t show. They asked if the responders looked on top of a cabinet with medicine in it, checked trash cans in other areas of the home or tested “white specks” that could be seen on Eric Richins’ nightstand.
Dr. Pamela Sue Ulmer, who performed the autopsy for Eric Richins on March 5, said there “was really no evidence of injury.”
She said there were ribs likely fractured during CPR, the beginning stages of coronary artery disease which is common for adult men, some white nodules she looked closely at but determined it was his body’s response to the dust he encountered as a stone mason, and some pulmonary edema that could have been caused by CPR but she thought were likely caused by his overdose.
Ulmer said they tested for bacterial, fungal and Tuberculosis infection, but did not find anything else that would have contributed to his lung problems.
Watch the second day of trial streamed live here: