A Texas three-year-old is on life support after suffering severe injuries doctors say were inconsistent with explanations given by his mother and her boyfriend.
According to a newly released arrest affidavit, Chelsea Rene Berg, 30, confronted her boyfriend, Christopher Thomas Alexander, 30, about bruises found on her son Dawson Zamora, more than a month before the toddler was rushed to the hospital with severe brain trauma.
“He clearly hit his head when he fell, he has a bruise on his eyebrow and his whole jawline/cheek is bruised,” she texted him, according to the affidavit obtained by FOX4.
“You’re reckless. He has progressively been getting more and more hurt with you!!! Leave me alone!!! I’m not blind. You’re DANGEROUS.”
But despite the confrontation, police say Berg left Dawson in Alexander’s care again on October 14. She told detectives she left for work around 7:20 a.m. and later received a call from Alexander saying he was taking the child to the hospital.
According to court documents, Alexander claimed he heard a “thud” and found Dawson unresponsive.
But doctors said the boy’s extensive injuries, which included bleeding on the brain, wounds to his chest and stomach, bruises in various stages of healing, and anal trauma, were inconsistent with that explanation.
Berg insisted her son did not have those injuries when she left for work that morning. Alexander hired an attorney at the hospital and refused to speak with police.
Additional text messages from the affidavit – that police say revealed a disturbing pattern of abuse – show Berg repeatedly expressed concern that her boyfriend was harming her son.
She wrote that Dawson continued to suffer new bruises even while staying home from school to heal from older injuries — including one on his genitals that she said she’d dismissed because “it could have happened at school.”
“1000000% serious. You bruise him, hurt him, and cause damage every single time you are along with him,” she wrote on September 18, according to the affidavit. “There hasn’t been a single time you’ve been along with him where he hasn’t been hurt.”
Both Berg and Alexander were arrested on October 16.
Alexander, 30, is being held in the Collin County Jail on charges of injury to a child, stalking, and tampering with or fabricating evidence with intent to impair an investigation. His bond is set at $210,000.
Berg is charged with injury to a child, a first-degree felony. She bonded out of jail the same day she was booked.
Court documents state Berg is barred from contacting her son under the conditions of her release.
But days later, she reportedly received word that Dawson had no brain activity so she filed an emergency motion asking a judge to modify her bond so she could “say goodbye to her son before he passes away.”
Dawson’s current condition has not been publicly updated, but his biological father, Dahrian Zamora, declined an interview with FOX4, stating that he wants to remain at son’s hospital bedside.
A GoFundMe for the child as been created by extended family describes Dawson as a “brave little boy with a long fight ahead.”
