Maybe if they spent the time to look in to it then , that they have spent reviewing it now... things would have been different...

Creek Dog read between the lines. The poor child was beat senseless literally. She grew up in group homes and mental institutions. She suffered permanent traumatic brain injuries. She suffered injuries that lead to her short life. Poor, poor baby! If their is a God Grand Ma is in Hell! As for the police charging anyone I think we all know it's way beyond that now. The only judge that can bring justice now is God! Good Day!

Oh yea though she was 36 years old the poor baby never grew up beyond a child mentally. So yes thats why I called her a child and that is an accurate statement. Good Day!

If the grandmother is dead, why bring up the case? Why wasn't she prosecuted for attempted murder before she died?

I know a family that the teenage daughter had a child. The adult father (over 18) abused the baby and caused severe brain damage. The grandmother was given custody of the disabled child. He died from his injuries within 10 years. The father was first convicted of child abuse. After the death he was convicted of 2nd degree murder. He is still in prison. By the way the mother of the child moved in with the father of the child and had a second child. She stayed with him till he went to prison. The grandparents were good parents. The daughter was a good student and seemed fine till she hit her teens. I don't know what went wrong, but did it ever.

A 20 year old living with her mother has THREE KIDS!

The taxpayers most likely have supported this entire family forever and the expense of institutionalizing this daughter surely fell on the rest of us.

I'm so tired of parasites!

Oh man. It is like a suspense thriller story. I could not understand a bit. Bad writting. hahahaha.

There are too many holes in this article. I wish the research was more complete.

I agree, it is murder at least second degree!!!

Whomever did the injuries to this baby will spend their eternity in H!ll. They obviously know what they did and hopefully, the guilt will not be or has not been unfelt.

If she was taken from the hospital and placed in a facility, the taxpayers have been paying the bill. A 20 yr old mother with 3 total children was probably on welfare. The mom should have been charged and forced to pay for the care that was required for this person all these years.

Mother of three at twenty, living with her mom? No wonder the old lady was pissed.

dig her up... have a trial... keep a lawyer employed.

CreekDog, did you not bother to read the article? This woman lived in a facility for people with disabilities. She probably never had the normal childhood you are referring to, of riding bikes or gym classes in regular schools. Please think before shooting your mouth off.

Back then it was called "disciplining," especially in Southern States. In my high school in Kentucky, corporal punishment was acceptable back in the 70's. No wonder the South is so vindictive, especially with equal rights and social issues. Let's go buy a Chic-Fil-A folks and continue the pattern.

What exactly caused her death? A brain injury that couldn't have been operated on during those 36 years..? Or was it the poor care she MAY have been receiving? I worked in a nursing home, and there was a patient who suffered a severe brain injury, hit by a car, when she was a little girl. She was VERY healthy, had a great appetite, loved to have fun, talk, walk around, she was quite a handful at the age of 55, she even liked to show off the scar on the back of her head. I could never imagine that one day she would die from an injury she suffered 50 years earlier.

If the investigators/child services believed that a 4 MONTH OLD "slipped" on a toy, then I have a few parcels of swamp land in FL I'd like to get rid of!!!!!

Granny since you are dead, it's pretty darn hot where you are lady!!!!!

i thought i did

Someone could be severely beaten or severely abused, survive the abuse but then years later die indirectly as a result of the abuse. It's possible that this happened in this case. Since authorities believed that the grandmother was responsible for the abuse of the the child (she wouldn't have been taken away otherwise) why wasn't she prosecuted for abuse? No doubt if she abused her daughter, abuse of her grandchildren wouldn't be far fetched.

It's almost like a free pass for the abuser. I wonder whatever happened to the other children. Apparently they weren't taken away and put in foster care. It would be interesting to learn what's happened to them over these years.

I can't help from commenting on this topic. I was a police detective in Texas for a little over 13 years. My entire caseload consisted of allegations of child physical abuse or child and adult sex crimes. During that time, I investigated over 1,000 sex crimes. I can't even begin to count the number of cases of physical abuse. However, in order to understand child head trauma, we have to understand some major reasons for incidents like the present one. First of all. most cases of Shaken Baby Syndrome involve children under one year of age. The brain of an infant is totally different from an adult brain, although from attending countless autopsies, they do appear exactly like an adults, only smaller. Nothing could be further from the truth. An infants brain is more gelatinous. Neural connections are still forming. The mechanism of SBS is debated in the medical community as some physicians insist that shaking alone is not enough to kill an infant. Most physicians believe that this assumption is false. Many things happen to a child when they are shaken. First of all. bouncing a child on your knee or tossing them in the air does not ever cause SBS. The mechanism at work in SBS in that a much larger and stronger teenager or adult is shaking a baby violently out of rage, frustration, or anger. The suspect grabs the child generally around the torso and shakes them very violently for several seconds. That's all it takes. Often you will find bruises and broken ribs. The bruises happen because of the strength of the handhold on the anterior chest wall. The rib fractures are most often found posteriorally as the suspects fingers try to squeeze the life out of the baby. Imagine an NFL quarterbacks grip on a football as he is trying to pass it 50 yards downfield. Now multiply that force by a much greater factor, only it's an infant instead of a football. Infants ribs are very hard to break as they do not ossify until years later. At this stage of a child's life, the ribs are made of cartilage, not bone. Cartilage is much harder to break than bone. The suspect's shaking of the infant result in a cascade of injuries. Autopsy may reveal a broken neck or blood under the skin from the neck shaken violently. ( hematoma) As the infant is being shaken, the two hemisperes are actually rotating or twisting inside the skull, tearing the bridging veins between the hemispheres . Since the skull is a closed cavity, the bleeding begins to put pressure on the various structures inside the brain, increasing intracranial pressure ( ICP) Depending on the area of the brain effected by the swelling determines the severity of the injury. If the brain herniates into the opening where the spinal cord connects to the brain, the child always dies within a few minutes. There is nothing medical science can do. However, if the child is shaken and the head struck against the wall, a table, or thrown onto the floor, like someone spiking a football into the ground, there will be skull fractures and bleeding from the dura mater or the arachnoid layers inside the skull, the bleeding may be in other areas. SBS is not always fatal. However, the symptoms will be evident within 15-20 minutes, if the child lives that long. If the child is taken to the hospital, physicians will notice petechaie or pinpont hemorages in the retina of the eyes. This is not definitive of SBS alone as these hemorages are seen in drownings, accidental asphyxiations, and other conditions.However, a constellation of these injuries, including a vague or unknown cause as related by the caregivers will make the diagnosis. The suspect will often claim the child fell off of a couch, out of bed, or tripped. These explainations coupled with the above symptoms make a diagnosis of SBS very likely. I can't say how it is investigated in other states, but in Texas, the physician is required to report it to Child Protective Services, who notify law enforcement. The patrol officer goes to the hospital and notifies the detectives who are required by law to conduct independent, but parallel investigations with CPS. The degree of injury determines if the child lives or is moderately or severely impairmed. There are few cases of mild impairment. Most care givers are going to lie to the hospital and law enforcement- that is a given. However, a thorough investigation may invoke a confession that tells part of the truth. One case that I worked the boyfriend gave me three different sworn affidavits. The last one was about 80% of the truth. It invoked shaking the child and tossing her like a shot put towards her bed. The baby flew through the air for a distance of about 12 feet before the child landed on her head. The last time I spoke with the grandparents who were caring for the victim, she was eight years old and were pleased that she could turn herself over in the bed, but couldn't sit up. This child required a room full of medical equipment to care for her. The suspect was given a sentence of 40 years in prison. The victim got a life sentence. Still doesn't seem to be right to me. I would say from my experience that about 40% of the child deaths were committed by males, while the rest were committed by females. I can assure you that the majority of the law enforcement community takes these cases very seriously. What has bothered me are the surprising number of non-fatal cases of child abuse that involved broken bones or serious injuries that any experienced physician would recognize as probable child abuse that is never reported. Many of these cases were called in by family (especially feuding families) after the fact and after everyone had time to get their story together. If the injury involves a very young child, we can't ask them what happened because they can't talk. Quite a few of these cases are never disclosed, especially if the family was middle or upper class and took their child to the family physician. If child abuse stats were based on reports from the family doctor, the rate would be less than 1%. The other 99% were covered up until the statute of limitations expired on the offense. I have been disgusted by the cases I worked that involved immersion burns, intentional burns on a 6th month old infant, where you could see the flame marks on the child's stomach as well as the two marks from the wheel of a disposable lighter were branded into the child's flesh. I worked another case where a boyfriend crammed a weiner down a two year olds throat until there were pieces of weiner into the bronchial tubes, almost to the lungs.The child choked to death. There are many more horror stories I could tell you. The only thing we can do for our defenseless children is to report, report, report. The law in Texas doesn't require a person to see the abuse, but just suspect the abuse, using common sense. It is also illegal to falsely report any crime.When I was a Lieutenant over this unit, I assigned many cases that we received from CPS, not because they were definitely a crime, but because they looked suspicious. I told the detectives in my unit that they might think I was crazy as some of the CPS cases were rather vague, but that I would rather assign 100 cases in which no crime occurred than miss the one case that turned out to be true. Our children depend on all of us to protect them and it requires community action to catch as many abusers of children as possible. I know that someone thinks that "you can't spank your children" but in Texas, corporal punishment is still legal. Yes, you can spank your children but not to the point where they have open wounds with blood running down their legs or extension cord scars that never fade. We must work together to protect our children !! Since I don't know all the details in the present Texas case it would not be appropriate to show my ignorance by expounding on what should or should not be done. Most cops I know will go to any legal length to protect a child.Yes, it is not unheard of to prosecute a case that occurred decades ago, but eventually causes death. If the medical examiner states that the cause and manner of death are consistent with a homicide, then it's a homicide. Sex crimes I'll reserve for another time.

36 years ago the laws were not like they are today and a child didn't have much of a defense - there was nothing to protect him/her because a parent, grandparent, could hit, spank, abuse a child and no one did anything about it. First, no one said anything about the abuse because they were ashamed and they also knew there was nothing to be done about it. Many a child suffered because of it, too.

This is one case where authorities really screwed up, at the time of abuse; I'm sure there have been many others.

Its terrible that this woman died in her 30's and though she was physically abused as a child by her grand mother and the mother knew about it, it is merely impossible to DIRECTLY link that series of abusive acts to her death....30 or so years later.......

What about an abusive teenage boyfriend.......what about an abusive fiance...what about any phyical malay that she had from 4 months old to her death?...What about that time she fell off her cousins handle bars ......or was playing in the basement and fell out the bunk bed and hit the concrete floor.....or fell down the stairs as a teenager and hit her head on that iron sewage Line in the basement or even that time she was riding in grand dads old Chrysler and fell out the back seat on to the street as grandad was pulling into Dairy Queen at 15 miles per hour while the car was moving? Back before it was required that folks wear seat belts. For all these incidents ....she never went to the hospital...she just lived another day. What role did everyday environment, stresses, and wear and tear have on her death?

To clearly say that her death was EXCLUSIVELY related to her injuries as a 4 month old ...when she was in her 30's or so upon death..........HIGHLY unlikely!

I don't think murder fits here. Manslaughter might be more apt. Usually it's murder only if you intend to kill. I think if grandma (or whoever abused the child) had intended to kill the infant, the infant would have died as an infant, since infants are so small, fragile, and defenseless. THAT would have been murder. But dying as a result of actions that were not intended to kill, such as abuse that occurred 36 years ago, might be considered manslaughter.

This story is sad. But it's really difficult to judge what happened so long ago, with most people involved being dead. Probably the investigation will not produce any tangible evidence apart from the mother's testimony.

Must be a slow news day at PMSNBC.

I need to brush up on my child rearing days but,,,a 4 month old baby can't walk ,can they? How could she fall from tripping on a toy? Just another sad story of grown-ups beating little kids,it will never end,,,,,,,,,,ZZAR