Katherine Bunnell and her lawyer, Gerard H. Donley, listen to the jury say that a verdict had not yet been reached yesterday.

The Providence Journal / Bob Breidenbach

PROVIDENCE –– The jury in the Katherine Bunnell child-murder trial deliberated all day yesterday without reaching a verdict.

At 4 p.m., Judge Gilbert V. Indeglia sent the jurors home for the evening after asking the foreman whether the jury wanted to continue deliberations or knock off for the day.

The jury of five men and seven women deliberated without a break yesterday, except for a noontime stroll down Benefit Street accompanied by a pair of deputy sheriffs.

The jury sent Indeglia a couple of notes with questions about the murder case, but lawyers said they couldn’t disclose the contents and neither of the notes was read in open court.

Bunnell, 24, is being tried in Superior Court on charges of murder and murder conspiracy.

She and her boyfriend, Gilbert Delestre, are accused of fatally beating a foster child in their care, 3-year-old Thomas “T.J.” Wright, after they returned to their Woonsocket apartment on Oct. 30, 2004, and found a mess the toddler had made on the living room floor.

Because each accuses the other of inflicting the fatal injuries, Bunnell and Delestre are being tried separately.

T.J.’s baby sitter, Kayla Roderick, took the stand and gave a graphic description of the beating, detailing how Bunnell punched and slapped T.J., and how Delestre hurled the 32-pound toddler across the living room, causing him to land on the floor with his leg twisted under his stomach.

Delestre’s cousin, Jose A. Santiago, testified that when T.J. stopped breathing and he tried to revive the boy with CPR, Bunnell tried to snatch T.J. from him and screamed at him for calling 911.

Assistant Attorney General Stacey P. Veroni told the jury that the testimony proved that Bunnell is guilty.

But Bunnell’s lawyer, Gerard H. Donley, suggested that Roderick and Santiago couldn’t be believed — Roderick because she was a teenage girl susceptible to pressure from the police to explain T.J.’s injuries, Santiago because he was a self-dramatizing witness who by his own admission was drunk when the beating occurred.

Donley argued that it was Delestre, 27, not Bunnell who inflicted the fatal injuries, beating T.J. to death after Bunnell left the apartment to drive the baby sitter home.

jcastell@projo.com