Trial begins for man charged with killing his girlfriend's 20-month-old daughter

The woman’s testimony came during the first day of what is scheduled to be a two-week trial for Marshawn D. Giles, 25, who faces 15 felony and misdemeanor charges, including first-degree intentional homicide, related to the April 25, 2022, death of the girl and other incidents in the 12 days leading up to it.

In her opening statement Tuesday, Deputy District Attorney Andrea Raymond told the jury that the girl died after Giles had punched the girl, threw her into a bathroom and then picked her up again and swung her, striking her head on the porcelain edge of a toilet.

A criminal complaint states the girl died from blunt force injuries to her head, including multiple skull fractures.

Giles has pleaded not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect, so the trial is being held in two phases. At the end of the first, the jury will determine whether Giles is guilty of some or all of the crimes he is charged with. If he is found guilty, the jury will hear evidence about his mental state at the time during a second trial phase and decide whether he was insane at the time.

The woman who testified Tuesday is not being named by the Wisconsin State Journal, nor are members of her family, because she is also alleged to be a victim of sexual assault during the same incident in which her daughter died. Giles is charged with second-degree sexual assault of the woman, and is also charged with first-degree sexual assault of the toddler.

Raymond said an autopsy found evidence the toddler had been sexually assaulted.

The woman’s testimony Tuesday did not reach the events of the night that her daughter died. She will be back on the witness stand Wednesday morning.

She left off on Tuesday telling jurors about carrying out a bizarre task for Giles the night of April 23, 2022. That night, Giles gathered a seemingly random array of items belonging to the woman and her three children, including pillows, a bath towel, dog toys and a picture of Marilyn Monroe and put them all into a cage used to crate a dog in a home.

Giles then had the woman drag the cage a block away from her Schroeder Road apartment and set it where a makeshift memorial had been erected for a recent homicide victim.

“I just didn’t understand the reasoning behind any of this,” the woman testified. “I was very confused, I guess, at that point.”

But she said she felt as though Giles left her no choice but to do it.

“I was scared for my life,” she said. “I felt like if I didn’t do what he said it would be worse for me.”

Giles showed up soon, she said, and fired two gunshots into a lamp post that was near the memorial, which also frightened her.

The woman said she had known Giles since they were both teenagers, but she got reacquainted with him in January 2022. By late February or early March, she said, he had started moving himself into her apartment, bringing with him other members of his family to stay at times. She said he didn’t have a job but had an idea for a clothing business that never went anywhere.

The abuse she suffered from Giles often centered around where her children went to school, food, money and where and when she went anywhere, she testified.

On April 13, 2022, while looking through Giles’ phone, she testified, she found texts and photos of another woman and confronted him. He responded by punching her repeatedly. More violent incidents would follow in the days after, until the woman reached a point on April 23, at 4:30 a.m., stranded on the South Side because Giles had taken her vehicle, keys and purse, when she called 911 and got a ride to a hospital. A few hours earlier that morning, she testified, Giles had beaten her badly and strangled her at his mother’s home, where they had gone for reasons still not clear to the woman.

But she declined to give police or medical personnel Giles’ name, so no further investigation was done. She testified she was afraid of what he would do if she had given police his name.

Michael Covey, one of Giles’ attorneys, said in his opening statement that he and co-counsel Andrea Winder would not concede anything during the trial but also would not contest any facts. The jury’s job, he said, was to give Giles a fair trial.

Covey set the stage for the insanity phase of the trial by describing Giles’ change in behavior as sudden and unexpected, seeing spirits and talking to dead people. When he was arrested by a tactical team after attacking the toddler, Covey said, Giles was unintelligible and incoherent.

“One officer will say it sounded like he was talking to somebody else, someone who wasn’t there,” Covey said, also calling Giles’ behavior “absolutely bizarre.”