A bus driver accused of attempting to murder a 21 month old toddler walked free from court today after a jury found the charge ‘not proven’.
Paul Curtis, 26, had denied using ‘blunt force trauma’ to fracture the back of little girl’s head, causing a life-threatening bleed inside her skull.
The child fell into a coma and surgeons at Glasgow’s Royal Hospital for Children carried out an emergency operation to remove a massive blood clot which was pressing down on her brain.
Medical experts compared the severity of the youngster’s injuries to someone having been involved in a serious car crash, falling from a first floor window or coming off a fast moving push bike and striking their head on the road.
The bus driver, who was in a relationship with the youngster's mother at the time, had denied physically throwing the little girl on the floor in a temper at her mum’s flat in Rutherglen, South Lanarkshire, in October 2018.
He said in evidence that he was horrified by the fact that people would accuse him of doing “something so evil”. Describing himself as a "big guy", he claimed he took steps to protect the girl from harm by sleeping on a sofa to avoid the risk of crushing her in her mum's bed.
He told the High Court at Livingston: “There’s no way in Hell I would harm that child, absolutely no chance in Hell.”
However, he admitted he had failed to tell doctors, social workers and police investigating the cause of the youngster’s injury that she had fallen from a supermarket shopping trolley three days before she was rushed to hospital, saying it slipped his mind.
A jury at the High Court in Livingston took four hours to return a majority not proven verdict which acquitted him of the charge.
Curtis, 26, from Castlemilk, Glasgow, breathed heavily and held his hand over his mouth as the jury’s verdict was read out. After judge Lord Beckett told him he was a free man, he ran from the dock in tears into the arms of his father and hugged him.
Outside court he declared delightedly: “That’s it! It’s over!” And, turning to a court police officer he told him: “You’ll never see me again”.
The girl’s 24-year-old mother – who can’t be named to protect the child’s identity – gave evidence that Curtis had been angry at having to wait outside for her in his car for an hour 16 October, the evening before her daughter had to be rushed to hospital.
She said the baby, who had a viral infection, had been sick on her pyjamas and bedclothes and she asked the accused to change her while she went to the toilet.
She said: “I could hear him moving about. It sounded like he’d been using really loud bangs. He was huffing and puffing, stamping and stomping. He was continually swearing and moaning. He wasn’t happy.”
At her mum’s house the next day, she said, her daughter was unable recognise close family members and, when she tried to stand up, she fell to her knees.
“That’s when I knew it was definitely more than a viral infection she had.
"I ended up asking Paul to come back up to take her to the hospital with me.”
Within a matter of hours the child’s condition had deteriorated so much that she was sent for a CT scan then rushed to surgery for an emergency operation.
Later in a waiting room Curtis told her relatives that he was “going to go down for this” an apparent confession which he later dismissed as “a stupid remark”.
The jury heard expert medical evidence from Miss Emer Campbell, a Consultant Neurosurgeon at Glasgow’s Royal Hospital for Children, who removed a piece of the youngster’s skull to remove the massive blood clot which was pressing onto her brain.
She said the serious fracture at the back of the child’s head had ruptured the main vein which drains blood from the brain causing serious internal bleeding and put the girl at risk of dying or suffering irreversible brain damage.
Child protection consultant Dr Katherine McKay, who is also based at the hospital, said the cause of the injury remained unexplained, leading her to conclude that the most probable cause “must be abusive head injury”.
She said: “Serious injuries are mostly accidental and parents will tell you what that accident was. If you don’t get a history of a fall in a seriously injured child then you have to suspect abuse, particularly if the baby or infant is less than two years old.”
