A High Court judge has described a father allowing his defenceless four-year-old son to be subjected to a “frightening” campaign of physical abuse, and misreporting the boy’s “catastrophic” fatal injuries as having been caused by a fall from a bunk bed, as a “shameful betrayal” of the child.
Passing sentence on the man on Friday at the Central Criminal Court, Mr Justice Paul McDermott said the defendant bore a very high level of criminal responsibility for failing to nurture and protect his son.
The judge highlighted that there was a “callousness” in how the child was treated by his father and said the defendant’s “deliberate disregard” for his son’s welfare was “extremely difficult to understand”.
Mr Justice McDermott said the aggravating features of the offending was the age of the victim and described him to the court as “a small, defenceless four-year-old little boy” who had been “isolated in a continuously frightening situation”.
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The child was found at a house in the southwest of the country on March 13th, 2021. He died three days later in hospital in Dublin.
A postmortem report revealed that the boy’s cause of death was traumatic head injury in association with blunt force trauma to the abdomen.
The man’s co-accused and former partner had pleaded guilty to the manslaughter of the boy but this was not acceptable to the Director of Public Prosecutions. A date has not yet been fixed for the woman’s trial.
The 35-year-old defendant, who cannot be named for legal reasons, pleaded guilty last March to charges of endangerment, neglect and impeding the apprehension of the person who he knew or believed to have murdered the child.
Mr Justice McDermott sentenced the man to seven years in prison for assisting an offender and another seven years for endangerment of the child. The man was also jailed for five years each on two counts of child cruelty.
The man’s sentences are to run concurrently and were backdated to March 2024, when he went into custody.
Before delivering the sentence, Mr Justice McDermott said the child’s mother suffered from some mental health issues and had voluntarily given custody of the child to the boy’s father and his then-partner. He said the boy had been attending creche when he lived with his mother but that this had stopped after the new custody arrangements were put in place.
The judge said he was satisfied there was “a clear and disturbing pattern of abuse” of the child, of which the boy’s father was aware. He said the defendant had played a significant part in not only “hiding” the child but also minimising those injuries.
He said the child was subjected to “frightening forms of chastising and assault” as well as being isolated from members of the family. He said outsiders were not allowed access to the boy so they could not see his injuries.
“He was even left, on the basis of evidence found in his bedroom, without the basic comforts of sheets and a duvet,” the judge said. “This should have been a place of safety and comfort. Much occurred not only in his own home but worse in his bedroom which turned into a place of fear.”
He said the defendant tolerated, knew and allowed his son to be subjected to the abuse “culminating in his child’s death”.
The judge said those who were interviewed by gardaí had described the child as a typical four-year-old boy who was “into everything” including playing and wrestling. He said the boy was a “good mixer” with other children, didn’t find it difficult to talk and was “a happy, cheery little boy”.
The judge commented on Friday that the boy, who slept in a steel framed bunk bed, was not provided with a ladder to access his upper bunk. In a nearby bedside locker, gardaí found various remedies for pain including hot and cold packs, Arnica cream and steri strips. A waste bin in the bedroom contained an empty tube of Arnica cream.
Mr Justice McDermott said he had received “a detailed and heart-wrenching” victim impact statement from the child’s mother.
The boy’s mother had previously described holding her son in her arms as his life support machine was turned off. The woman, who gave a victim impact statement at the man’s sentence hearing last July, said that even at four years of age her “beautiful brown eyed boy had so much potential” and she could not wait to watch him grow but his life had been “robbed” from him.
Paramedics and hospital staff had noted extensive old and new bruising all over the boy’s body including around his eyes and ears. When asked by doctors how the boy had sustained the bruising, the defendant said his son, who he claimed was “clumsy” and “hyperactive”, had fallen into a door two weeks previously.
The court was told medical staff in the hospital were of the view that the bruising was the result “of a non-accidental injury”.
The defendant has 14 previous convictions, mainly for road traffic matters. He previously received a suspended sentence for violent disorder.
The judge extended his sincere sympathies to the child’s mother and the extended family.
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