It was the kind of phone call that makes a mother's heart stop. Soon after arriving at work one April day two years ago, Andrea Mitchell called home to check on her kids: Jake, 9, Isaac, 2, and twins Alex and Aiden, 4 months. The Mansfield, Ohio, single mom had no reason to suspect anything was amiss. The babies, and their older brothers, were all smiles when she left the house. But she'd only recently gone back to work, and with a new sitter still settling in, she called home regularly.
This time she got the sitter's husband, who was out of breath when he answered the phone. "Alex has quit breathing!" he told her, panicked.
The next hours were a blur. The sitter rushed Alex to the hospital. Mitchell raced there and waited for test results that might explain why her baby, perfectly healthy an hour and a half before, was now having seizures and struggling to breathe. The news, when it finally came, was unimaginable: Alex had massive bleeding in his brain and hemorrhages in both eyes; he was in a coma and on a ventilator, and it wasn't yet clear that he'd survive.
Such injuries, the ER doctor explained, can be caused by only one thing: violent shaking. The police were called, and Mitchell wasn't allowed to go home to take care of her other children until after a full investigation. "I was living a nightmare," she says.
Five days later, she learned the truth: The babysitter had left her unemployed husband alone -- briefly -- with the three younger children while she took Jake and their own two kids to school. Investigators eventually concluded that during that time, he'd shaken the infant so ferociously that Alex, now 2, was left with permanent injuries: partial blindness, cerebral palsy, epilepsy, and impaired swallowing.
The sitter's husband pleaded guilty to assault charges and was sentenced to seven years in prison. But Alex will live with this tragedy for the rest of his life. Most likely, he'll always need a caregiver, and, when he becomes an adult, a legal guardian as well.
Contributing editor Margaret Renkl is the mom of three children.
