Toddler battered, bruised and burned, court hears
Bill Cleverley, CanWest News Service
Published: Thursday, August 30, 2007

VICTORIA - There is no doubt that a 19-month-old baby boy who stayed with his common-law parents for a five-day visit emerged abused, B.C. Supreme Court Justice Malcolm Macaulay was told Thursday.

"This child was battered. This child was bruised," Crown counsel Nils Jensen said in his summation in the trial of the boy's common-law parents. Both are charged with aggravated assault, assault causing bodily harm, negligence and failing to provide the necessities of life to the boy

Medical evidence presented to the court showed that after the visit the boy had 36 marks on his body including scratches, bruises and a burn on his leg. MRI scans revealed the boy also suffered a hematoma (collected blood) on the brain. There was also evidence of weight loss and possible dehydration.

The prosecutor said medical evidence offered only two possible explanations for the bleeding on the brain. One would be from severe blunt force trauma such as the impact from a car crash and the other would be from shaking.

"The only conclusion that can fairly be drawn from the evidence was that this baby was shaken," Jensen told the judge.

The charges stem from five days in July 2005 when the child was staying with his parents during a temporary visit arranged by the Ministry of Children and Families. The visit was an attempt to reunite the family while the child was in foster care.

The father admitted to police in video-taped evidence that he had hit the boy in the head twice and shook him a couple of times.

The court also saw videotaped interview with the mother in which she said she hit the child with a plastic toy, allowed him to tumble down the stairs and burned him by touching him with a vacuum.

But the judge, who is hearing the case without a jury, decided he will not be able to consider the mother's videotaped admissions as evidence, ruling the police interview had improperly induced the mother to give the information and had threatened she wouldn't be able to get her other children back unless she told the truth about the boy.

While that information couldn't be used against the mother, the father's lawyer, Andrew Tam, argued the statement should be admissible to provide an alternative explanation for the hematoma - in that it could have been caused by the fall down the stairs. Macaulay will hear legal arguments on that today.

Tam said his client's statements about shaking the child made clear that it was a gentle action not aggressive.

"The suggestion (the boy) was shaken by (the father) with a great deal of force was specifically denied," Tam said.

While there was no evidence to suggest the father was even at home when the baby was burned on the leg, the mother's lawyer, Chris Massey, said there was only circumstantial evidence to suggest it had been caused by his client.

He said there was even medical evidence that suggested the burn was a minor contact burn that could have had an accidental cause.

Massey said it was not his contention that the child hadn't been assaulted. He noted the father admitted to striking the child. But he said the Crown had not established the mother knew the boy might be harmed or was being harmed by the father or even that the father posed a risk.