The unusual legal case is approaching judgment in the Skaraborg district court in Skövde.
At the center is a cohabiting couple: A father of two and a 35-year-old mother who had their first child together last winter. Both are now suspected of abuse of the baby.
The father already has a son with another woman. That boy is five years old today, but was taken into care in the fall of 2021, when he was three months old. He had difficulty breathing and bruises when he arrived at the hospital. X-rays showed fractures in the skull and six bones.
The administrative court assessed that it was likely that the injuries occurred "due to some form of external violence".
In 2022, Chamber prosecutor Ylva Lundgren dropped the case. "In my case, the baby was premature and based on what the forensic doctors wrote in the legal certificate, I could not prove intent to harm the baby," Lundgren writes today to DN.
However, a doctor told the social service that she was "very surprised that they are canceling" the preliminary investigation.
The father has relinquished custody and that boy lives today in a family home in another place.
Four years later, the man moved in with a new woman, now in Skövde. She became pregnant and staff at the BVC say in questioning that everything seemed normal with the child at the beginning. But in April this year, when the boy was two months old, they noted that the head had grown rapidly and the boy was vomiting profusely.
Shortly afterwards, the parents took the boy to Skaraborg hospital. The doctors then found a series of broken bones and serious head injuries.
The police arrested the father already at the hospital. This after the mother's friend, who drove them there, secretly mentioned to the nurse who received the family that the father had been suspected of abusing his first son.
The police also brought the mother in for questioning. Two months ago, both parents were charged on suspicion of extremely serious assault.
But an important difference is made: The father alone is suspected of having carried out the violence - the mother because, as a guardian, she had a so-called guarantor responsibility but did not intervene.
Both deny any form of violence against the boy. The mother has said through all the interrogations that she never saw the father being violent. The father says the same about the mother.
Chamber prosecutor Mia Djerf has led the investigation. Central to her prosecution is a 24-page affidavit signed by two doctors at the Forensic Medicine Agency.
It says that "the injuries were life-threatening and could have resulted in death had the plaintiff not received medical attention," and that they "collectively suggest that he was subjected to blunt acceleration-deceleration force, such as shaking."
The father's lawyer, Christin Hofbauer, believes that the prosecution is based on an incorrect assessment by the healthcare system and the coroners. In the district court, she referred to articles in medical journals which state that injuries of the type the boy had can occur naturally.
Christin Hofbauer defended the father even when he was suspected of having injured his first son.
- I understand that there are two camps among paediatricians. Partly those who stand behind the theory of the so-called triad, where bleeding in the brain and signs of brain damage are a consequence of what is often called concussion violence, partly those who question that theory.
- You simply cannot rule out other reasons, continues the lawyer and speaks of "risk of a kind of witch hunt on poor parents".
A question that has come up is whether social services, healthcare or the police with knowledge of what happened to the first child could have passed information on to the father's new municipality.
- There was no exchange of information between those municipalities, and this is what the system looks like. I am not going to comment on what should have been done there or not, says prosecutor Mia Djerf.
The boy's interests are defended by the plaintiff's assistant Ellen Hagrup Grimlund. She believes the idea of having some form of alarm routine when there are well-founded suspicions is important.
- It is terrible that this kind of thing is not conveyed via the social services, or childcare centres. It should be possible to send a warning signal when it comes to things this serious, but within the framework of confidentiality, of course.
At the same time, lawyer Ellen Hagrup Grimlund says that it concerns "very privacy-infringing information".
- The first police investigation was therefore dropped. Should you, as a parent, get a stamp on yourself going forward? I admit I'm ambivalent.
However, the father's lawyer Christin Hofbauer is skeptical.
- Should there be some sort of ban on having children then? If you are not convicted, you are innocent. Then there can be no communication between the authorities. There we would go over our legal certainty.
A manager at the social service in the municipality where the first boy was born writes to DN that she cannot comment on "which contacts or which information transfer has taken place between different businesses".
There is, she also writes, "no general mechanism or system that makes a social service automatically aware that a person who was previously relevant in another municipality is later expecting or having a child in another municipality".
In the Västra Götaland region, BVC receptions sort under Närhälsan. It refers to a guideline which states that "in some cases it is possible to provide information between authorities and for the protection of an expected child without hindrance of confidentiality".
At the Skövde municipality's social services, where the child in question was born, Charlotta Pilfalk writes that "in some cases, a report of concern is made from the original municipality to the new one if the family moves and there is continued concern about the children, but this presupposes that there are already existing children or knowledge that a parent is expecting a child".
Prosecutor Mia Djerf does not question the decision to close the investigation into the first child. She has had the opportunity to resume the preliminary investigation from 2022, but has made a similar assessment as her colleague.
At the same time she says:
- For me, it is difficult to ignore the fact that the damage images are so similar. What are the odds of the same father's children coming to the hospital with such injuries when they also have different mothers?
The boy in question now has a protected placement in a family home. According to information to DN, brain damage remains, but they are healing and he is said to be "okay under the circumstances".
Mia Djerf has requested that the father be sentenced to eleven years in prison and the mother to seven and a half years in prison. The man has previously been unpunished and the certificate from the forensic psychiatrist says that he does not suffer from any serious mental disorder.
