QUICK! Someone punch it!
Shopper arrested for punching newborn baby after ‘mistaking her for toy doll’
Well that’s certainly understandable and..wait, WHAT?
In England, Amy Duckers was shopping at a supermarket with her five-day-old daughter in a baby carriage. She was approached by a 63-year-old man who overheard family friends saying, “Come and have a look at this beautiful baby.” The man suddenly punched the baby in the head, then reacted in horror when the infant burst into tears. He told police that he thought the baby was a toy, and not alive.
Oh! That explains it, then. Everyone punches dolls belonging to strangers in the face. It’s a mistake anyone could make!
The infant is recovering, but I may not. I can’t get my mind around this crazy incident. If he really thought the baby was a doll, you can’t properly charge him with a crime, but how would you categorize what he did? It’s obviously unethical—he has no right to handle someone else’s doll—but how much leeway do we give idiots or crazies, when their handicap causes them to do something like this?
The guy has been arrested, and it will be interesting to see what he’s charged with, and how the system deals with him. I assume that he will be observed for mental health issues. If he’s not, and they release him with a pat on the back and a “next time, make sure it’s a doll before you punch it,” I’m going to be very upset.
Ethics Alarms 
Alcohol may have been involved.
Or shrooms.
A normal person would have to take a LOT of mushrooms to screw up like that, but at that point, you probably wouldn’t want to be in public, or walk for that matter.
Ha! Thanks for the morning chuckle.
No problem. You can pay me back in mushrooms.
Not as bad as that monster who shot a baby in the face during a robbery, but bad enough. Honestly, had that been one of my babies, he wouldn’t have had time to say “oops!”
Felony endangerment?? Oh – this is England. Just a flesh wound. Cheerio.
At least the parents didn’t pull a gun. Now THAT would have been an unforgivable crime!
I don’t know the laws of England (don’t WANT to know them!) – but I would not be surprised if you are exactly right, about how a gun-brandishing would compare to a baby-punching, over there…
Why in God’s name would anybody punch someone else’s doll in the face? This makes no sense to me what-so-ever.
Someone who doesn’t know that the Child’s Play franchise is fiction?
I had to go look up this story, and as shocking as it was, and I know this is a bit of a tangent, I found the following lines… interesting:
1. Greater Manchester Police said: “A man has been arrested on suspicion of assaulting a baby. Police were called shortly before 6.45pm to a supermarket on Altrincham Road in Baguley on Monday to reports of a child having been hit.
6:45 PM.. Baby punched in the face… remember that…
2. Elsie was rushed to Wythenshawe Hospital, arriving at around 9pm, and was kept in until 4am the next day on Tuesday.
9PM??? Rushed? It took them Two hours and 15 minutes to get her to the hospital in an ambulance?
I think that says a lot about the state of socialized medicine in the UK.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/09/07/shopper-arrested-for-punching-newborn-baby-after-mistaking-her-f/
Well, the baby seemed okay, and they did have some shopping to do.
More likely a mistake in the reporting but it’s not terribly unusual to be waiting for hours to be seen in casualty and I’m sure it’s made especially worse with the doctors’ strikes going on lately. A friend of mine is acquainted with this family and if you go to the mother’s facebook page and read her statement to the police you will see that this child is very much adored and that they are distraught over this. That was an unkind comment even made in jest.
I just can’t helm myself, being that I loathe and fear babies. One bit me when I was a kid.
It seemed like you were half seriously criticizing the parents but I may have been mistaken (?). The son of a girl I knew at school was hit by a speeding car at a pedestrian crossing about five years ago and it was partially caught on either CCTV or another motorist’s dashcam. In the midst of the ordeal (boy was still in intensive care) some of her “friends” thought it would be really helpful to send her links to online discussions where locals were saying it was her fault because “everyone” knows that road is dangerous, she wasn’t paying attention, that they hope the kid dies rather than lives with brain damage etc. Not all the comments were mean spirited but a lot were. Of course what you said is comparatively harmless and the little girl is home now but I think we should refrain from saying anything clever or sarcastic about these stories because it could compound the nightmare if the family comes across disparaging comments.
Duly noted, but there was enough information in my other comments to see what I was getting at.
It is rarely “the victims fault”, but the delay in receiving treatment is what I think Joed was referring to. Also, probably not the baby’s or his/her parents fault. Socialized medicine.
You’re exactly right, d_d.
Yes I know that was what was being referred to and I thought Joed was genuinely suggesting that it might have been delayed because the mother wanted to finish shopping. The more likely explanation is that she rushed to the ED, like any responsible parent, and a sour-faced receptionist determined that it wasn’t urgent and that they were understaffed anyway, or it’s just a typo.
My interpretation of the events was the child was slapped, and paramedics arrived in timely manner. The paramedics observed a red mark, but did not think was truly urgent or severe, so family waited to be interviewed by the police at the scene. The child was likely only brought to the hospital for observation overnight as a precaution. “Rushed” might be superfluous, to belay the fears of those skimming ahead to see if the baby would be ok.
I can only hope with all hope that a five day-old baby was not punched with the full force of a grown man, whatever the motivation, however malicious or negligent. My reading of the story seems to at least match this low standard of humanity.
All the reports I’ve read specifically say “punched” and so do the family friends on Facebook but I hope you are right! Still, I think that would be poor judgement on the part of the paramedics… a five day old baby struck by a grown man shouldn’t have waited that long to see a doctor.
Mother’s statement to the press: “The punch was that hard you could hear the connection as this man hit Elsie,” said Mrs Duckers, a carer. “I just can’t believe it – especially as it was on a five day old baby . It was the first time I’d taken Elsie out since she was born. Now I’m just too frightened to take her out again.”
Understand that based on the mother’s story, I woukd like to punch this guy in the face with the full strength of my grown athletic body. Still, she is not an impartial witness. Unless he punch the baby straight in the face (which would justify attempted murder charges), it would be difficult to punch a cheek while the child was in a stroller. The angle makes a slap more likely. A slap, or even light punch, would make a the sickening noise the mother heard, and leave redness, but a low chance of trauma. Observation over night would be absolutely appropriate to allow rapid treatment if new symptoms emerged, but would not require rushing to the hospital in the absence of acute symptoms. Nothing justifies the man harming the child, simply the evidence does not strongly indicate the child received inappropriate or delay medical care in the aftermath.
I suppose it might be difficult to land a punch on a baby in a “sit up and look around” type stroller where the child is near to the ground (if that’s what you are imagining), but newborns don’t have the neck strength for those so she was likely in a pram with a little bed contraption in the supine position at adult waist level, and if the hood was pulled back it would have been easy enough to punch down on her. Or semi-reclined in a car seat attachment even higher up at the mother’s chest level. I do accept now that a baby being hit isn’t necessarily an emergency situation that calls for an immediate CT scan, it’s just such a frightful thing to imagine. Babies aren’t as fragile as they look I guess… I mean just being born is pretty brutal if you think about it.
Do you remember what Robin Williams said about childbirth?
I could understand the paramedics making that call, especially since they’re trained to spot obvious brain trauma that demands immediate attention (Battle’s sign, etc.).
Actually, raccoon eyes is what I was thinking of.
…and cranial nerve assessment.
Exactly. Any acute symptoms and the child would be truly rushed to the hospital, likely with police escort.
Well if it was the right decision then there was no delay and everything was kosher but I thought paramedics were qualified to administer limited emergency treatment at the scene but not determine that an injured person doesn’t need a doctor at all. When my husband was in a minor fender bender (rear ended) and was completely unharmed the EMTs wanted to take him to the hospital “just in case” and had him sign a waiver when he declined. Surely a baby being punched in the face is so extraordinary it would warrant a speedy trip to the clinic. My youngest somehow suffered a skull fracture at six months old from a very small fall but seemed happy and had normally reactive pupils so we had no idea until two or three days later.
Are you studying to become a physician? I think I recall you mentioning that you were…
Yes, I am, and paying dearly for it 🙂
The thing is, the forces involved in a car collision, even a relatively low-speed one, are unbelievably brutal. If you run (on your feet) into a chest-level brick wall at 10 mph, that is the exact same vector quantity of force that’s applied to your body via the seatbelts or dashboard/steering wheel in a 10 mph collision. The force involved is much more than human beings are able to deliver with a fist, and the whiplash usually causes a secondary collision within the skull (coup-contrecoup insult). Everything happens so quickly during the accident that a patient’s recollection of events is unreliable, so an accurate on-the-scene assessment is difficult. Even then, a paramedic (they receive much more training than EMTs)can exercise some discretion and instruct the patient to go to the ER if there are any signs or symptoms of brain injury. My guess is that the paramedics assessed the baby, and he scored high on something called the Pediatric Glasgow Coma Scale, which gives some insight into the patients level of consciousness and likelihood of injury, and then instructed the parents to look out for s/s of injury.
Yes, I should have said I know that even seemingly minor car accidents can be serious but in this case my husband was driving a car that resembled an infantry tank and he barely felt anything. He said it was as if someone kicked it. The other driver’s airbags deployed so they were very sore of course. This was almost exactly a year after a previous rear-ending incident when we were hit by a teenager who was texting at 70+ mph. I was in the back with our first baby and took the brunt of it and fractured my pelvis in four places. I was really shocked to find how banged up I was, I thought multiple breaks would hurt a lot more than it did.
I looked up that scale you mentioned. So as long as she was awake, active and consolable there was probably no real damage done, medically speaking. Understood.
Believe it or not, those old cars are more dangerous because they’re so hard. What you want is a car that crumples to the greatest extent possible without hurting its occupants. This allows a more gradual negative acceleration. I know that sounds wrong, but in physics, there’s really no such thing as deceleration. Acceleration is the rate of change in velocity, either positively or negatively. It’s that rate of change that hurts you, hence airbags and crumple zones. By the way, you’re pretty lucky to have survived that 70mph collision, as I’m sure you know. You probably wouldn’t have in an old car.
I’m still trying to figure out what his problem is with dolls. Even it was a doll, what type of thinking makes it OK to see someone’s doll and punch it. Does he have some weird toy phobia that causes him to kick etch-a-sketches out of the hands of children he comes across? Does Britain have a problem with man-killing robotic baby dolls? Once I can figure out how he thought it justifiable to punch what he thought was a doll then I can deal with the rest, but I just cannot wrap my mind around walking up to a stranger’s property and punching it.
It bothers me when I see dolls NOT being treated like children (since they are supposed to represent children after all). I can’t even imagine punching one.
Same here. I can’t look at any depiction of a child without immediately thinking of my own.
Maybe he thought the baby was really Chucky after getting slipped some bad acid.