Toddler suffers violent death

It is also the story of a criminal justice system that might just as easily have let the criminal case involving Ronnie Davies disappear. However, all these documents and records also reveal the doggedness of a young, small-town police chief who made it his mission to sniff out the truth in the case of a 3 1/2-year-old boy who was beaten almost to death and then later died in May 1985.

So, the story of Ronnie Davies begins with efforts to save his life.

In a remarkable communication, Dr. Lonnie Hammargren of Sunrise Humana Hospital in Las Vegas advised St. George doctors by telephone about how to drill a small hole in Ronnie's skull to relieve pressure on the injury.

Blood spurted 10 inches into the air as Utah doctors did the procedure. Ronnie was still unconscious but stable, and the boy was flown by medical helicopter to Las Vegas, 130 miles away.

Six minutes after the helicopter landed, Ronnie was in the operating room.

A survey of documents, transcripts and medical records from the week he died chronicle Ronnie's slow float out of this world.

There was a flurry of activity to save Ronnie on Sunday evening — everything from artificial tears for his eyes that would never open again to more surgery to relieve pressure constantly building in his brain. The boy never regained consciousness.

May 6 — "Blood transfusion."

May 7 — "No clinical changes."

May 8 — "Critical state continues."

May 9 — "No response to pain. Patient is clinically, cerebrally dead," a morning report reads. "Child has no apparent blood flow to the brain," Hammargren wrote at 3 p.m.

Later: "Patient on ventilator. Patient demonstrates no heart rate.

"Patient declared dead at 3: 45 p.m."

"His heart just stopped and beat one time and that was it ... We probably wouldn't have been able to start the heart again anyway. We'd just been adding to the hospital bill and putting that poor little body through some more." — Interview with Pam Couevas, Ronnie's nurse at Nevada's Sunrise Humana Hospital, where he died.

Leland Thomas DeMille has always gone by Tom.

Back in the mid-'80s, he was a 5-foot-10-inch strapping guy — a sometimes weight lifter and bodybuilder with a bad temper and a history of violence, according to his ex-wife.

DeMille was born in Cedar City, grew up in Washington city, Washington County, and hooked up with Jan Davies, Ronnie's mother, in September 1984. It was right about the time Jan split from Ronnie's dad. By December, Tom had moved in.