A woman was jailed for eight and a half years today after attempting to murder a five-month-old baby despite trying to blame the child’s mother for the attack.
Kimberly Dow inflicted potentially life-threatening injuries on the defenceless little boy in a sustained assault when she was supposed to be looking after him during an overnight stay at her home.
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A judge told her at the High Court in Edinburgh: “You committed a very serious offence against a vulnerable infant in your care.”
Lady Ross said: “You have tried to evade, or at least minimise, responsibility. Your actions are unexplained and quite possibly inexplicable.”
The judge said that Dow, 34, has shown no concern, then or now, for the welfare of the baby she attacked.
Lady Ross said the injuries inflicted on the child could have caused his death and that there was no clear information about the long term prognosis for the victim.
“He had been entrusted to your care for an overnight stay. You were supposed to look after him, but instead you assaulted him,” she said.
Dow, of Maitland Street, Dunfermline, in Fife, earlier denied the murder bid during a trial last month and lodged a special defence claiming that if the offence was committed it was not committed by her, but by the child’s mother.
But a jury found her guilty of attempting to murder the infant on March 17 2022 at her home by shaking him and inflicting trauma to his head and causing injury to his head by means unknown to the prosecutor to his severe injury and to the danger of his life.
Advocate depute Michelle Brannagan told jurors that there was evidence of a single occasion when the victim suffered injury and that was when he was in the care of Dow.
When the baby was taken to hospital after the attack he was found to have 15 distinct and separate bruises to his face. He was also found to have retinal haemorrhages to both eyes which an expert said were too numerous to count.
The baby was also discovered to have significant haemorrhaging around the brain.
The bleeding was so extensive and in so many areas of the brain that it was likely the child suffered a prolonged period of shaking.
Ms Brannagan told the jury: “I suggest an overwhelming picture comes into painfully sharp focus. This was no accident. Someone hurt him.”
The prosecutor said the evidence suggested that the child was uninjured and behaving completely normally when he was dropped off at Dow’s home.
She said the incrimination of the mother was “a red herring” without “a single piece of evidence” to support it.
During accounts given by Dow she maintained that she put the child on a couch and left briefly but when she returned he was on the floor and had fallen.
In one message she said the child had an accident and “gave himself a sore one”.
The mother of the baby said she had no issues or concerns after Dow previously looked after the child when she and her mother contracted Covid.
She told the court: “He came back his normal, wee self – happy and content.” The woman said that on the occasion of the attack, Dow phoned her and asked if she could take the child for the night.
She said she tried and failed to make contact with Dow after she left her son in his care, but later heard the claim that he fell off a sofa.
She then received a message telling her to hurry up and come for the child as he was screaming and “tensing” his body.
The mother said that Dow tried to apologise to her when they met.
Defence solicitor advocate Gordon Martin said that Dow had suffered adverse childhood experiences of her own, but weaned herself off drugs later in life.
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He told the court: “There is no suggestion that she is someone who would reoffend provided she manages to remain drug-free.”
Mr Martin said: “It is inevitable that the court will impose a custodial sentence and she is aware of that.”
