Pretoria - It is not clear what caused the severe brain injuries of a boy, identified only as J, when he was 11 weeks old but a neurosurgeon says his brain suffered severe blunt force trauma hours before he was taken to hospital.
Dr Albert Viljoen denied that the brain fracture the baby had suffered could have been caused by shaking him, as suggested by the defence.
He said there must have been a direct blow to the baby’s head at about midnight, hours before he was rushed to hospital the next morning.
The baby’s parents, who are facing charges of attempted murder and child abuse in the Gauteng High Court, Pretoria deny any knowledge of how the baby got injured. They are also facing a charge of child abuse regarding the boy’s twin sister, only identified as M.
The dad said he was feeding Baby J at about 5am on Christmas Day, 2012, when the child suddenly stopped breathing and fell unconscious. He said he tightly gripped the baby around his head and ran to his parents’ room to get help. His father told doctors that his son shook the baby to try to wake him up.
The mother said she was sleeping at the time.
But Viljoen testified that a lot more must have happened than simply shaking the baby. The brain could only have been fractured after suffering a direct blow., he testified.
The injury did not occur around 5am, but rather around midnight, based on the findings of the doctors who operated on the baby later that morning, to relieve the bleeding and swelling of the brain.
The doctor said normally there were no sudden signs after a person suffered a severe blow to the head and the brain started to bleed. The signs would only occur once the bleeding had increased and the swelling of the brain too. It took several hours to reach the stage of swelling of the brain which Baby J presented when he was admitted to hospital.
The swelling of J’s brain was so severe when operated on, that it was already bulging out of the skull, he said. Doctors had to remove some of the baby’s skull - replaced later - to relieve the swelling. While the baby suffered a fracture to the left side of his brain, both sides of his brain were bleeding.
The advocate for baby J’s father on Wednesday used a doll, resembling a baby, when she cross-examined the doctor.
She demonstrated how the father claimed he held the child, with both hands around his head, when the child stopped breathing.
But the doctor said the baby’s injuries were severe and could not have been caused by the father’s alleged tight grip around his head. Because a baby’s skull is flexible, the injury to his brain must have been caused by a high velocity impact.
The 22-year-old mother and her former 24-year-old boyfriend said they had no idea how the child was injured.
While the boy was fighting for his life in hospital, a doctor examined his sister. She appeared fine but X-rays showed that she had four cracked or broken ribs.
The children are turning four next month. The twins are now in foster care with their maternal grandparents.
Pretoria News