Matthew Torbenson, Assistant District Attorney

The healing rib fractures mean that the child sustained rib fractures

At some point well before all these events transpired, weeks ago, maybe longer, is it possible that a child could get rib fractures by themselves and it be accidental?

Sure.

Is it likely that's going to happen without any medical evaluation or care?

Well, it becomes a lot less likely.

Then to get acute rib fractures also that are not healed,

which happened within days, short days of these events.

Again, we're talking about another trauma event.

And how many trauma events that you get that are severe that could all be accidental?

That kind of coincidence, while I think we have to at least briefly consider it, is not in my mind reasonable.

So this cumulative nature of these other injuries

is what leads me to the, I think, inevitable conclusion that this is not accidental trauma in this child.

That being said, having these other injuries out there doesn't help with the primary challenge here in figuring out when the really lethal injuries occurred and how they occurred.

So I think the hardest cases for us are the cases where a child is being abused time and time again, where a child is a battered child.

And oftentimes what we can say conclusively beyond a reasonable doubt in those cases is this child is being abused and this child is being abused repeatedly.

What becomes really hard is identifying who abused that child within the household.

Who's the person that committed it?

Because when a child's being abused time and time again, and you have multiple incidents of abuse, it opens up the timeframe in the window during when that child could have been abused.

And why do people shake children?

They shake children because it works.