A New Taipei City man was indicted on homicide charges on Friday after reportedly bouncing a baby off a spring-coil bed, which allegedly caused a fatal brain hemorrhage.
The man, surnamed Liu (劉), said he was “just playing with the baby,” but the New Taipei District Prosecutors’ Office dismissed his explanation and sought a heavy punishment for Liu.
The incident occurred in September last year, when the mother of the one-and-a-half-year-old boy brought him to visit her sister, who lives in Taishan District (泰山).
In the morning of Sept. 12, Liu, the woman’s brother-in-law, took the infant to another room to play.
While the boy’s mother, surnamed Chen (陳), was asleep in the next room, prosecutors said Liu lifted the baby about 1m high and “slammed” him down to bounce off an old spring-coil bed.
Liu bounced the crying boy 10 times, and then took him back to his mother, prosecutors said.
Chen was quoted as saying that she saw her son’s hands were shaking and his clothes had been changed when he came back.
“At the time, I did not think too much of it. Later my son woke up with a fever. I rushed him to Linkou Chang Gung Hospital’s emergency ward. He died two weeks later,” she said.
Under prosecutorial questioning, Liu spoke of bouncing the boy on the bed, but said he was playing with his nephew, officials said.
An autopsy report confirmed the death was due to intracerebral hemorrhage from injury sustained by external force, and also from neurological shock of a brain stroke, and thus was ruled a case of homicide.
The indictment said Liu knew that the bed was old and had a hard surface, adding that as the boy was under two years old, his head and body were not fully developed yet.
Thus when the boy was thrown by force from some height, not to mention repeatedly, it most likely caused severe head injury and led to death, thus there was an “uncertain intent to kill,” the indictment said.
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