3 babies injured, 2 fathers arrested in Marysville

Published 10:25 pm Wednesday, December 12, 2007

The 9-week-old Marysville twins, a girl and a boy, each had fractures caused by being shaken and squeezed by an adult, doctors said.

The girl stopped breathing, but emergency room doctors who saved her life on Dec. 5 said that was because somebody gave her an overdose of OxyContin.

On Nov. 30, a different 9-week-old Marysville girl was rushed to Children’s Hospital and Regional Medical Center in Seattle with broken legs. Those injuries happened when her diaper was being changed, officials alleged.

While the twins’ injuries are consistent with shaken baby syndrome, experts now are expanding that term to include a range of other traumatic injuries to infants caused by frustrated adults, such as the other girl’s broken legs.

“We’re moving away from the term ‘shaken baby syndrome.’ It’s abuse is what we’re talking about,” said Carol Jenkins, manager of the children’s protection program at Children’s. “What we’re looking at are the injuries that happen to a child.”

“Nonaccidental trauma” is intended to cover other kinds of injuries, such as those on babies roughly dropped into their cribs, grabbed by an arm, or whose legs are broken by being yanked during a diaper change.

The three Marysville babies police learned about in the last two weeks are all recovering, officials said.

Their cases are chilling reminders of how quickly parental frustration can lead to injury; how inexperienced parents can land in jail and how families can be destroyed.

The abuse is preventable through parental education programs, experts said.

On Tuesday, the father of the baby girl with the broken legs, a Marysville man, 22, was jailed. A doctor told detectives someone must have forcefully jerked the infant’s leg “in a way that it can’t go,” according to court documents. The doctor said fractures to the baby’s legs likely happened at different times, the papers said.

The girl’s father was released from jail Wednesday on his own recognizance.

In the case of the injured twins, their father was arrested Saturday. Doctors said they found dangerous amounts of the narcotic OxyContin and marijuana in the girl’s blood, according to court records. The father is suspected of not only abusing his children but also giving his daughter drugs, the records said. He was charged Tuesday with two counts of second-degree abuse of a child and remains jailed on $100,000 bail.

All the babies were released from the hospital and placed with relatives to recover under the watch of the state’s Child Protective Services, spokeswoman Karen Lee said.

“These two cases and many others like it are highly disturbing,” said Joan Sharp, executive director of Washington Council for the Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect. “It’s a tragedy for all the people involved.”

Nationally, about 17 of 100,000 children are affected by shaken baby syndrome. One in five of these children die, she said. About 68 percent will have some type of long-term neurological problems.

No statewide figures are available on how many children in Washington are mistreated in this way.

Any number of factors can lead parents to abuse their children. Most often the reason is simple frustration.

“What leads to shaken baby is the same thing that leads to other forms of child abuse and neglect and that boils down to stress,” Sharp said. “We hear more and more how much stress families are under.”

Anger problems, mental illness, substance abuse, a family history of trauma and community dysfunction are among contributing factors, she said.

Shaking a baby can quiet the child but it comes at a high price, often causing death, blindness, cerebral palsy, hearing loss, seizures, paralysis or learning disabilities, broken bones and bruises.

Babies often stop crying when they are traumatized, said Chris Jamieson, a council spokeswoman. Adults can misread the baby’s quiet as behaving. The abuse sometimes is repeated, to get that result.

Adults don’t realize how much stronger they are than infants, Jenkins said.

“It’s like an enormous gorilla shaking a doll,” she said. “We’re very powerful, and they’re very little.”

The father of the girl with the broken leg is accused of roughly picking the infant up by one leg because she defecated while he was changing her diaper, court papers said.

Children can be severely injured “within seconds… just a few seconds,” Jenkins said.

Every parent faces the same challenges, said Dr. Frank Andersen, medical director of Women and Children’s Services at Providence Everett Medical Center.

“All of us who have kids have experienced a great deal of frustration at some time or another,” he said. “It’s more an issue of how we deal with frustration. … It’s one thing to punch your hand through a wall. It’s another thing to shake your baby.”

When doctors suspect child abuse, they follow strict procedures to report the case to the state Department of Social and Health Services, he said.

There have been several chilling instances of child abuse in Snohomish County this year that investigators believe involved angry adults who didn’t realize the harm they could cause.

In May, detectives investigated a Snohomish man who shook a 2-year-old he was baby-sitting after she tried to put a penny into an electrical outlet. The toddler died and doctors found evidence of severe brain trauma.

In June a 4-month-old Lake Stevens boy died after his mother used transparent tape to keep the child’s pacifier in place and stop him from crying. Charges were dropped because there was no evidence that the boy died from the pacifier being taped in his mouth.

“Most of these parents aren’t bad people, they just don’t have the skills to deal with a newborn baby and no one to help them,” Andersen said. “What’s frustrating is not being able to come up with a way to help them deal with frustration.”

Parents aren’t told enough that it’s normal to be stressed because of a baby, particularly if they have to endure hours of crying or screaming, Jenkins said.

“What I tell them is put your infant down in a safe place,” she said. “Step away. Your baby will not die from crying.”

Once parents get a breather, a baby will often calm down with a car ride or a walk in a stroller, she said.

Organizations such as the Parent Trust for Washington Children are available to help parents who feel as if they’ve reached a breaking point and need help with parenting skills or dealing with stress, she said.

It’s OK for parents to ask for help, said Jenkins.

“We don’t come with a big manual to teach us how to be a parent, unfortunately,” she said.

Reporter Jackson Holtz: 425-339-3437 or jholtz@heraldnet.com.