Investigations into manslaughter: the public prosecutor’s office in Frankfurt (Oder) is investigating the death of a baby against the father
Investigation into homicide
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Public prosecutor’s office in Frankfurt (Oder) investigates father after the death of a baby
A 25-year-old is suspected of shaking his two-and-a-half-month-old daughter so violently last year that she succumbed to the operation. He’s now sitting in the inspection shaft.
After the violent death of a two-and-a-half-month-old baby, the public prosecutor’s office in Frankfurt (Oder) launched a manslaughter investigation against the child’s 25-year-old father. He is suspected of shaking and hitting his daughter so hard that the baby died shortly thereafter. The public prosecutor’s office confirmed this to rbb on request. The father is now in custody.
incident a year ago
According to rbb research, the incident had already occurred in July 2021. The then 24-year-old is said to have been alone in the apartment with his daughter at the time. The child is said to have screamed and could not be calmed down. A few hours later it was dead.
The public prosecutor’s office assumes that the father shook the child so violently that it died from the resulting attacks, spokeswoman Ricarda Böhme explains. “Forensic medicine has confirmed a shaking trauma and a fractured skull. The father must also have had such a violent, blunt effect in this way and brought about these findings,” says Böhme. What exactly happened that evening is still being determined.
Pediatrician: Most common unnatural death in infants
“Shaking to death” is the most common unnatural death in infants, explains pediatrician Wolfram Horn from Frankfurt (Oder) in an interview with rbb. In his 40 years of professional experience as a doctor, he too had treated such cases in his practice. The insights that emerged from this were enormous, he reports: “The brain in the head is thrown back and forth in a similar way to boxers,” says Horn.
This would lead to micro- or even larger bleeding in the head, because the smallest vessels would be torn off by the unnatural tossing back and forth, the pediatrician continued. This can lead to bleeding that gets into the brain itself or into the meninges. According to physician Horn, it is primarily fathers who are prone to such knee-jerk reactions.
Whether the baby killed in Frankfurt was also a knee-jerk reaction by the father is still being clarified, the public prosecutor said. The father has so far denied the crime. However, investigations are still ongoing.
Investigations are still ongoing
“In such cases, we are dependent on the forensic investigations,” says Böhme about the duration of the investigation. The public prosecutor’s office had to wait for a so-called section report that the authority only received in January of this year. In addition, the public prosecutor’s office subsequently obtained additional statements from the child protection ambulance, reports spokeswoman Böhm.
The long wait for the various assessments meant that the suspected father was only arrested in March 2022. He’s been sitting in the inspection shaft ever since.
Also part of the ongoing investigation is what role the 22-year-old mother played in the crime, according to the public prosecutor. According to their own statements, they were not in the apartment on the evening in question, but with a friend.
Broadcast: Antenne Brandenburg, afternoon antenna, July 14, 2022, 3:10 p.m
With material by Dorett Kirmse