A 31-year-old man has denied ever shaking his five-month-old daughter, causing her to suffer a brain bleed and other serious injuries, as he claimed that earlier statements admitting that he had shaken her and dropped her accidentally were both lies.
The accused, who can’t be named to protect the identity of his child, took the stand at Cork Circuit Criminal Court on Tuesday and said that he had lied both to medics at Cork University Hospital (CUH), social workers and gardaí when he made statements about how his daughter came to be injured.
The couple had brought the baby to CUH on January 4th, 2021, where doctors diagnosed that a bleed on the brain, bleeding at the back of her eyes and soft tissue injuries near her spine were consistent with abusive head trauma or shaken baby syndrome, but the couple could not explain the injuries.
The man later told social workers at CUH on January 7th that he had accidentally dropped the baby at their home on December 7th, 2020, while later on January 7th he told consultant paediatrician Dr Rosina McGovern that he had also accidentally dropped the baby at home on January 4th.
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The man had said the first fall occurred when he was winding the child on his shoulder, and she toppled and fell on to a sofa before landing on the wooden floor, while the second fall happened when he tripped near the top of the stairs and the baby fell from his arms on to the landing.
But on Tuesday, when cross-examined by prosecution counsel Jane Hyland SC, the man said both statements were false but said he made them after his partner’s mother suggested that he do it, as CUH staff were not allowing them to take the child home until they found out what happened to her.
“Dr McGovern told me the injuries were the equivalent to a car crash and if we tried to leave the hospital, security would be called . . . somebody I trusted (his partner’s mother) then suggested it would be a good idea to tell them I dropped her,” he said.
He initially told the social worker he had dropped the child on the sofa, and she fell on the floor on December 6th but when Dr McGovern said the child’s injuries could not have resulted from such a fall, he made up a story that she fell a second time on January 4th at the top of the stairs.
Asked by Ms Hyland why then he sought a meeting with a Tusla social worker and told her on March 23rd that he had actually shaken the baby on two separate occasions, the man said that he feared that if one of them didn’t admit shaking the baby, they would lose custody of the child.
He said they had been given supervised access to their child by Tusla at her grandmother’s home, but his partner was pregnant and not eating, and he was worried about her so he decided to say that he had shaken the infant and would take the blame so his partner could be reunited with the child.
He had told the Tusla social worker that he was at home alone with the infant in her highchair on December 7th and was cooking when the smoke alarm went off and the child started to cry, and he took the child and shook her back and forth for a few seconds until she stopped crying.
And he had said that on the second occasion, on the morning of January 4th, that he was again at home alone with the child and made her breakfast and they had gone back to bed, and he had fallen asleep, but the child woke up crying in her cot and he had again shaken her.
Asked by Ms Hyland if the story about the accidental falls amounted to the third set of lies that he had told about what happened to his daughter, the man said that he would say “it was the same lie that I just kept going . . . yeah, I told lies [but] to get my daughter back.”
The case continues.
