Cologne –
The district court sentenced a man to six months probation on Wednesday who believes it is guilty of having shaken his two-and-a-half-year-old son so hard as a baby that he suffered trauma. With the sentence, the lay judge complied with the prosecutor’s request. The defender of the 25-year-old scaffolding worker had demanded an acquittal. She wants to appeal.
The act is said to have happened on the night of November 11, 2018 in the apartment in Flittard, which Dennis K. (name changed) shared with his wife and two children at the time. The woman had come to the hospital three days earlier. She had given the older son to her mother, the three-month-old baby to a neighbor in the next house who had often looked after him. Dennis K. picked up his son on the morning of November 10th. The next morning, the child had drunk far too little and was “ready and done,” he said.
He immediately informed his wife and sought help from another neighbor who lives in the same house. The baby was brought to the children’s hospital in Amsterdamer Strasse and, with suspected shaking trauma, transferred to the Asklepios children’s clinic in Sankt Augustin. There the doctors implanted a shunt for him through which cerebral fluid mixed with blood could drain.
Chat history and testimony
Since there is no other cause for the bleeding, “all that’s left is shaking,” said the forensic doctor who attended the trial. However, the exact time at which the baby was abused cannot be determined. The presiding judge said that Dennis K. was the culprit, as a result of the “interplay” of witness statements and chat processes. Accordingly, the baby was still healthy when he picked it up. Apparently he was then overwhelmed with the care; for example, he used the word “terror” in a Whatsapp chat when the child screamed that evening.
“I can’t imagine that he did that,” said the defendant’s mother-in-law, who now has a daughter with his 23-year-old wife. She emphasized that he was a “good father”. “The child must have been shaken, but we don’t know what time,” emphasized the defense attorney in her plea. Perhaps it was mistreated in the apartment of the neighbor who looked after it and her husband, who had a friend visiting for hours at the time. After all, it was not right for the man who was stuck in the “exam stress” that his wife had taken the baby. The witnesses had shown a tendency to “blame” their clients for the shaking trauma.
The court saw it as a less serious case of “abuse of wards”. As things stand, the child has not suffered any permanent damage, said the chairwoman.
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