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"Please God, let my son live!"

Dad prays for miracle as son, stabbed with stick, lies in coma

Posted Sunday, May 13th 2007, 11:12 AM

He sits each day by the hospital bed, placing hope above logic that his 12-year-old son will one day emerge from his coma.

It has been nearly a month since Stevenson Celius was attacked by a classmate, a stick driven through his head.

"I go to the hospital every day. ...I watch my son," the heartbroken father said at his home Friday. "God is going to give him life again. That is what I need - I believe it."

Antoine Celius, 35, has quit his job so he can spend more time with his son at Kings County Hospital.

"We were always together," the Haitian immigrant said. The two shared a bed in a small room in a third-floor walkup in Prospect-Lefferts Gardens, Brooklyn.

"When I go to sleep in our bed, I don't have my son," Celius said. "I miss him."

To make a better life for him and his son, Antoine Celius and Stevenson arrived in New York five years ago. They joined a bevy of relatives who had settled in Brooklyn's bustling Haitian community.

Everything changed April 19.

While the initial encounter between the two boys - who attend a local public school - was amiable, the meeting turned ugly when Stevenson, who had left home to buy potato chips, came back out of a deli.

"The little boy was watching him," Antoine Celius said.

When Stevenson came out with a bag of chips, the boy wanted the change from Stevenson's purchase.

"The little boy asked my son for a dollar," Celius said police told him. "My son didn't give him the dollar."

After that, Celius said, his son appeared scared but walked away - and out of range of a surveillance camera that recorded the exchange and captured the suspect carrying a piece of wooden molding with one end sharpened.

The two made their way to Celius' apartment building lobby, where the 11-year-old suspect allegedly sunk the stick 2 inches into Stevenson's skull.

Though they were classmates, "I don't think they were friends," Celius said. "If they were, he wouldn't have put that stick in my son's brain."

The suspect, identified only as Tevin W. because of his age, faces felony assault charges in Brooklyn Family Court. He is being held in a city juvenile detention facility.

Pretrial hearings in the case began April 23. Last week, Judge Nora Freeman reviewed statements the suspect allegedly made to police; she has not decided whether to admit those statements at trial.

No trial date has been set, according to officials at the city's Law Department, which prosecutes juvenile offenders.

Antoine Celius - who was in Haiti for a brother's funeral when his son was attacked - said detectives showed him the surveillance tape.

"It was very hard for me," the father said. "I'm very angry."

Doctors have told him his son's brain is "half dead," which even an optimist such as Celius finds hard to take.

He refuses to contemplate a life without his quiet and studious fifth-grader, but when asked what was next for Stevenson, he paused.

"I don't know," he said.

Source: NYDailyNews