Shaken Baby Syndrome: Myth Or Murder?

While there’s no question that SHAKEN BABY SYNDROME shatters lives, a new study is casting doubt over the way it is DIAGNOSED. For parents who insist they’ve been falsely accused of harming their children, it’s both HEARTBREAKING AND A SOURCE OF HOPE, reports Cat Rodie.

- Cat Rodie

At 2.30am on December 4,1998, Lorraine Harris’ Yorkshire home was quiet and still. Clambering out of bed, the 28-year-old mother of three made her way to her infant son’s cot. Four-month-old Patrick had been grizzly that day; the family GP suspected he was getting a cold.

Harris pulled back Patrick’s cosy knitted blankets, expecting to find her treasured boy sound asleep. But when she saw him, she immediately knew something was terribly wrong. Panic-stricken and crying hysterically, Harris called an ambulance. Patrick was rushed to hospital under blue lights and the wail of sirens, but there was nothing the doctors could do to revive him.

Wracked with grief, Harris sobbed over Patrick’s tiny, lifeless body in a sterile hospital room. Outside the door, police were waiting.

Post-mortem results showed that Patrick’s brain had a combination of three injuries – his brain was swollen, and there was bleeding behind his eyes and on his brain – and these symptoms are widely believed to be indicative of Shaken Baby Syndrome (SBS).

Harris was arrested and charged with manslaughter. “I felt like I was in a haze. I couldn’t talk, I couldn’t move, I was just staring into space. I’d lost the son I’d so desperately wanted – and I was being accused of killing him. I just couldn’t believe it,” she tells marie claire.