BATON ROUGE — The lawyer for a man accused of second-degree murder and obstruction of evidence after a toddler's death told a Baton Rouge jury Thursday that her client didn't kill the girl but did try to keep police from learning what happened.

Phillip Gardner was accused after Nevaeh Allen's body was found in a shallow grave in Mississippi. Prosecutors say the girl mother's punched her, and that Gardner put the girl in a suitcase — still alive — and drove to a wooded area to hide the crime.

Both sides presented opening statements in Gardner's trial on Monday. The child's mother, Lanaya Cardwell, goes on trial Nov. 3; both pleaded not guilty in 2022.

According to the government, Cardwell punched the child because she was playing with her mother's last set of contact lenses. The blow knocked the child into a vanity cabinet, where the girl struck her head. After failing to rouse the child from a sleep, Gardner worried Cardwell would go to jail and decided to hide the body, prosecutors said Thursday.

Gardner's lawyer, however, said her client was a "hard-working family man" and guilty of nothing more than obstruction of justice. 

Allen was reported missing in September 2021 before her body was found in the Logtown area of Hancock County, Mississippi. 

After the punch, Gardner said, Nevaeh had a bruise on her forehead, according to police documents. When he returned from an errand, Nevaeh refused to eat due to stomach pain and became unresponsive, he told police, according to an affidavit.

Ultimately, he drove Nevaeh's and two other children under his supervision to Mississippi, where he buried Nevaeh in the woods and threw her clothes in a trash can, officials said.

Initially, Gardner had said he fell asleep and awoke to find the child missing. He later said he found the girl unresponsive and the buried the girl in Mississippi. Police say he left his cell phone at home so he wouldn't be tracked.