Pretoria - By the time Baby T turned five months, she had suffered 31 fractures, the Gauteng High Court, Pretoria heard yesterday.
The baby was also thin, dehydrated and on the brink of death – all because her parents had assaulted her and did not care for her. She was in fact a broken baby.
This is according to the prosecution in the trial of a 22-year-old woman and her now former boyfriend who are facing charges of attempted murder as well as child abuse and neglect.
The pair pleaded not guilty to all the charges.
While they did not dispute the medical evidence, backed up by X-rays done on Baby T, they were at a loss for words to explain how that had happened to the prematurely-born infant.
Baby T was in hospital for the first time when she was just two months old, with nearly all her ribs – on both sides of her body – broken.
Some ribs were broken in more than two places and they were in various stages of healing.
By the time she was back in hospital three months later, she had 31 fractures in various stages of healing. One of the fractures was to her femur – the longest bone in the body and probably the most difficult to break, a doctor told the court.
According to the time frame in which the injuries had occurred and the state she was in when she was taken to hospital on the second occasion, she must have been left crying in her bed from hunger and pain, prosecutor Cornelia Harmzen yesterday told Judge Hennie de Vos.
Baby T was born on February 1 last year, and while she spent a few days in an incubator as she was tiny and premature, she was healthy when she was discharged.
But when she was admitted to the Eugene Marais Hospital on April 3, as she could not breathe, most of her ribs were broken.
The police arrested the couple at the time, but only the young father appeared in court and both parents were out on bail.
For unknown reasons, the baby was back with them until she was admitted again in a critical state on July 10 last year.
She has since been placed in the care of a family member and the parents were charged again.
Neither of them accused the other or could explain who had harmed their baby.
Judge De Vos voiced his concern about the fact that after the baby landed in hospital twice and even after their arrest, the parents neither questioned each other about what had happened nor tried to find out who had hurt their baby.
“If something like this happens to your baby, you surely ask each other how the baby got hurt,” the judge said.
Harmzen responded that that was because they knew that both of them were guilty. “This is a case where the pot refused to call the kettle black because both assaulted the baby,” she said.
She added that it is impossible to have so many fractures, as well as a bruise to the face and a soft tissue injury to her neck, without the parents noticing it.
According to the prosecution, the parents did not care for their baby. They left her crying, injured and hungry because she did not fit into their lifestyle, she said.
Counsel for both parents argued that there was no evidence that they had hurt the baby, other than circumstantial evidence. The advocate acting for the father said he had spent very little time with the baby because he worked most of the time. According to him, the three did not live together all the time.
It was argued that the father did not have control over the baby as she was mostly in the mother’s care. The judge was asked to acquit the father because there must be reasonable doubt of his guilt.
Counsel for the mother also asked for an acquittal and said she had made it clear during her evidence that she did not assault the baby, nor did she notice anyone else hurting her child.
It was said that the mother too was at a loss for words about how the child was injured.
Judgment will be delivered on October 18.
Pretoria News