- DAY ONE: Mother weeps as alleged baby killer’s trial begins
- DAY TWO: Court hears of baby’s final hours
- DAY THREE: Father’s trial continues
- DAY SIX: ‘I would never hurt my kid’
- DAY SEVEN: Father questioned in interview recording
- DAY EIGHT: Court hears accused father ‘snapped’
- DAY NINE: Jury urged not to try to ‘give closure’
A Supreme Court jury has heard a “constellation” of injuries suffered by a baby allegedly shaken to death by her father was caused by “mechanical head trauma”.
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Joby Anthony Rowe, 24, is on trial in Bendigo charged with one count of child homicide, following the death of his three-month-old daughter, Alanah Rowe, in 2015.
Expert witness Linda Iles, a forensic pathologist at the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine, told the court Alanah’s injuries were caused by “mechanical head trauma” inflicted on her by an outside source.
“Based on current medical literature and clinical understanding, there is no other cause that I can identify, or that I am aware of,” she said.
Under questioning from Crown prosecutor Fran Dalziel, Dr Iles said she did not believe Alanah’s injuries could have been explained by the baby having choked on vomit or baby formula and become unconscious.
Ms Dalziel asked Dr Iles if she believed a spontaneous “re-bleed” from subdural and subarachnoid haemorrhages Alanah may have sustained during birth could have led to her collapse, a scenario Dr Iles also rejected.
“I don’t believe that is possible,” she said.
“There is no mechanism for her to collapse in that scenario.”
Under questioning from Mr Rowe’s barrister, Paul Higham, Dr Iles said while it was possible for a baby to choke on its food, resulting in cardiac arrest followed by injury to the brain due to a lack of oxygen, this could not have occurred simultaneously with any spontaneous re-bleeding.
“You would be positing simultaneous re-bleeds in multiple locations, which would seem to me to be incredibly unlikely,” she said.
But Dr Iles accepted there were other practitioners in her field who believed it was not possible for injuries like Alanah’s to be caused by shaking, which was one of a number of “controversies” in a field that did not have a “sufficient scientifically robust evidence base”.
“Simply the difficulty is, you can't test on young infants?” Mr Higham asked.
“It really comes down to that, yes,” Dr Iles said.