A man sentenced to ten years in prison for abusing his one-month-old baby in Montblanc.

BarcelonaA man has been sentenced to ten and a half years in prison for abusing his one-month-old son in Montblanc. The man caused injuries that required surgery and one ICU admission in 2019The child suffers after-effects that, now that he is five years old and under the guardianship of the Generalitat (Catalan government), have resulted in a 70% disability. The ruling by the Tarragona Court ultimately acquitted the mother, who was also held in pretrial detention under investigation for the abuse.

The assessments of the various healthcare professionals involved in the trial made it clear that the injuries were not accidental. When they examined the baby, born on January 4, 2019, they detected several injuries with varying degrees of progression, which led them to believe they were not due to a blow or an accidental fall. The injuries caused the baby to lose too much brain tissue and left him with irreversible after-effects.

Today, he is five years old, in P3, and is undergoing neurological and ophthalmological follow-up. He is not an independent child, but he walks on his own after being discharged from physiotherapy a year ago. He is also accompanied by speech therapists, and all professionals agree that it is still difficult to determine future consequences. Precisely for this reason, the man must pay his son one million euros in compensation. The sentence, for a crime of injury with severe deformity, also prohibits him from approaching or making contact with the child for 12 years.

The trial was to clarify whether the responsibility for the abuse lay with the father, who was 22 at the time; the mother, who was 21; or both. Both the man and the woman spent a few months in pre-trial detention. And both arrived at the July trial as defendants. At the last minute, the Catalan government's private prosecution withdrew the charges against the woman.

The prosecution continued to demand 12 years in prison for each of them, but admitted it had doubts about the mother's involvement. Key to resolving the issue was the attitude both men displayed toward health care and prison workers, who saw empathy in the mother and coldness in the father. In fact, they explain that the woman did not abandon "the belief" that the man had not abused her son until she had already been in prison for about two months, "separated from his influence" and the emotional dependence she felt.

The ruling also states that, in response to the coroner's explanations about the serious injuries her son suffered, while the woman cried until she collapsed and could not believe what she was feeling, the man told her not to worry, that if they took the son, they would return him "in six months." He was referring to his eldest son, from a previous relationship and from whom custody had already been removed, that the child's mother now has.

He hid it from the woman

Another key element in convicting the man and acquitting the woman is that the court found that he lied to her about one of the baby's medical visits. After being discharged from the hospital where he was born, premature and by C-section, but completely healthy, the couple failed to show up for the first checkup. Four days later, the woman took the child to the doctor for a checkup, and the nurse found nothing abnormal. There were also apparently no injuries during subsequent visits, but on February 12 (when the baby was one month and eight days old), the man took the baby to the emergency room because he was vomiting. The pediatrician found "a certain pallor and poor response to stimuli" in the child and recommended that the man take him to the hospital. But he didn't do so, nor did he explain the doctor's advice to his partner.

In any case, the next day they both returned to the emergency room because he continued to vomit, which they said was related to a medication he was taking for a yeast infection in his mouth. During the examination, the professionals at the Joan XXIII Hospital found bruises and injuries, including one on the femur and a 1.5-centimeter hematoma on the jaw. Doctors suspected they were not accidental and activated a child abuse alert.

At the time, the child's eyes weren't focusing well and his limbs were stiff. An ultrasound confirmed multiple injuries. At the trial, the man attempted to defend himself by saying they could have been caused during birth, something that has been ruled out because the child was born healthy. He also stated that, due to work, he wasn't often with his son in his first few days of life, changing his original version, in which he had explained that the baby was always with him or the mother.