Scott Gladwin trial: Baby suffered head injury

Scott Gladwin, now 20, is standing trial at Nottingham Crown Court, accused of shaking baby Scott Cawthorne so hard that it caused a catastrophic brain injury.

The baby could previously not be named but his identity can now be revealed after Chad challenged the reporting restrictions placed on the case.

Baby Scott died in February 2010 - when Gladwin was aged just 16 - after he had been left in Gladwin’s care at his home on Woodland Avenue, Huthwaite.

Dr Patrick Davies, a consultant paediatrician in the intensive care unit at Nottingham’s Queen’s Medical Centre, told the court yesterday that baby Scott was transferred to the QMC from King’s Mill Hospital and was put on a life support system.

A CT scan showed that he has suffered a ‘severe head trauma’ but medical staff were given no information to explain how he had sustained such a severe injury.

After examining him, Dr Davies found two small bruises on the baby’s left ear which his mother Kelly Middleton could not explain.

One was on the outer part and the other on the inner ear and due to their location, he described them as ‘extremely unusual’.

He said that it he did not think they could have happened as a result of medical intervention during resuscitation.

An eye specialist confirmed that baby Scott had bleeding in the back of both his eyes and an MRI scan confirmed that his brain matter ‘had essentially died’ after being starved of oxygen, said Dr Davies.

This would have happened as the baby underwent 52 minutes of resuscitation at King’s Mill Hospital, and following paramedics’ efforts to get his heart re-started when he was found in a state of cardiac arrest.

As a result of the severity of the injury, baby Scott’s life support was withdrawn and he died in the early hours of 6th February 2010.

Dr Davies explained that immediately after receiving the ‘huge amount of force’ that produced the injury, the baby would have shown symptoms.

These could have included unconsciousness, which ‘maybe difficult to spot’ because it ‘could have been mistaken for sleep’.

He added that he had only seen such a head injury in one baby before and that baby had been ‘thrown out of a car at high speed’.

It was not the type of force that would be used while playfully throwing a baby in the air and catching it, as Gladwin was seen to have done to baby Scott previously.

Gladwin denies a charge of manslaughter.

The trial continues.