Matthew Torbenson, Assistant District Attorney

It quiets the child.

You're rattling that child's brain, um,

you're inflicting that brain trauma on it but we do have cases where you have compounding brain injury over a period of time and so you're not just seeing an acute brain injury and acute bleeding but you may be seeing chronic blood on and then acute blood on top of the chronic blood in those situations we can say this child's likely being abused on multiple times on multiple occasions over a period of time and we also know that abuse escalates with children so you it may start off with just a squeezing of the head or a squeezing of the jaw

where you get some fingertip bruises on a child, and then it may escalate to squeezing the ribs, and then it may escalate from there to shaking the child.

And we see that oftentimes too.

So I have a couple cases in my office that I refer to as my box cases, and they travel with me whenever I switch offices in the DA's office.

And they're the cases where I know the child was abused, I just can't prove which one of the parents inside the home did it.

And they're the hardest cases to handle, and they're also the hardest for me to let go of.

Absolutely.

So the rib fractures are going to be really painful at the time that they're inflicted.

And the child's going to scream out likely in pain as a result of the ribs being broken.

But oftentimes what we see in those cases is the ribs, after they're fractured, they may be stabilized.

They may not be displaced.

And so when they're not displaced and they're not poking into the lungs or anything like that, they're generally stable and they're not going to cause a whole lot of additional pain to that child.

unless the child is being handled or manipulated by the ribs, held by the ribs.

Breathing may be painful for the child depending on the size of the child, but it's going to appear to the non-offending parent as the child's just fussy.

or that the child just seems hard to console or things of that nature.

They may not be picking up or associating.

Every time I touch the child's ribs, that's what causes the child to wince in pain or to cry out.

They may not connect those experiences because they're not the abusive parent.