"Newborn Jane" HICKS - 3 Months (2010) - Harwich/ Boston MA

The girl wore pink and white sneakers, fastened with Velcro tight to tiny feet that love to run.
About 3 feet tall with inquisitive brown eyes and a desire to explore, she's a
2-year-old rugrat in the fullest sense of the word.

At first opportunity she bolted down a
Barnstable sidewalk on an unseasonably warm spring day. She shrieked
with delight, her light brown hair bouncing as she toddled away from her
young mother. After 10 or 12 flurried steps, though, the girl fell hard
— face first — the way only a little kid can.
The tears flowed as mommy kissed the scratches and hauled the youngster
back to the car. The girl was over it soon though — the smile back on
her face. She's been through worse. Much worse.
On a fall night in 2009, emergency workers were called to a Harwich
apartment after the girl — then 3 months old — stopped breathing. She
was taken to Cape Cod Hospital where doctors found a cracked rib during a
routine X-ray. Additional scans revealed another break, then another.
She was taken to Boston where doctors found the rest — nine snapped ribs,
two broken femurs, two broken arms and a cracked tibia — 32 breaks in
total, scattered across her 24-inch frame. It was the result of repeated
abuse from her father.
"(Doctors) told me they didn't know how she survived," her mother said. "DCF (the
Department of Children and Families) said it was the worst case of child
abuse they'd seen in 10 years."
The girl's father spent 12 months in prison after admitting to abusing his
daughter. While her physical injuries, miraculously, have healed, the
emotional scars could last a lifetime. With the help of her mother and a
family support system, the little girl is recovering slowly from the
psychological toll.

Unseen scars

In October 2010, Lamar Hicks, 23, of West Yarmouth pleaded guilty to
assault and battery on a child with injury, assault and battery and
violating an abuse protection order filed by the girl's mother.
He was sentenced to 2½ years in prison by Barnstable Superior Court Judge
Gary Nickerson but served one year. He was placed on probation as a
condition of his plea agreement and is now being held on $10,000 bail
after several alleged probation violations earlier this year.
The girl and her mother are not being named because the Times does not identify victims of crimes.
Today, the girl has no contact with her father and is too young to consciously
remember him or what he did to her. Certain unseen scars remain, though.
She'll lick walls and scratch herself.
She's had problems pronouncing words and can act out in social
situations. It's the result of psychological trauma, experts say.
Two years after that horrific November night, the family is focused on the
future. The girl has seen a child psychologist and trauma specialists,
but both met with limited success because of her age. But the girl will
turn 3 in June and enter preschool in the fall.
It's the first step in her recovery marathon. It's a process that could take years,
but the family is ready for the long haul.
"We just want (the girl) to be happy and healthy, and thank God she's
alive. It could have been a lot worse, and it came close to being a lot
worse," her grandmother said. "We just take what we can get."

32 broken bones

Nov. 14, 2009, was a relatively warm and clear fall day in Harwich.
But shortly after 5:30 p.m., the wail of sirens cut through the light
evening breeze as emergency workers responded to Hicks' and the mother's
apartment after a frantic 911 call that the child had stopped
breathing, according to a police report and the mother.
"We got home one night and she was in her car seat and she just had this
look on her face and her face got kind of red, and I thought she stopped
breathing," the mother said.
The girl was taken to Cape Cod Hospital, and that's where doctors found a broken rib.
They thought it was from the CPR. Another X-ray revealed more broken
ribs. Then leg fractures. Doctors determined that she needed to see
specialists not available at Cape Cod Hospital, according to medical
documents provided by the family.
"I was in shock; I didn't know what to believe," her mother said. "I didn't know. I
had no idea, I didn't know what happened at that moment."
The next day, Nov. 15, the girl was taken by ambulance to Massachusetts
General Hospital in Boston. The hospital has a specialized team that
deals with suspected cases of child abuse.
It took dozens of tests to determine the extent of the girl's injuries.
"They X-rayed her from her head to her toes," her grandmother said.
A day later, doctors had a final count of her injuries. Of the 32 total
bones broken, several had multiple fractures, including her femurs,
tibia and forearm bones. The injuries to her legs were caused by a
pulling or twisting motion and were classified as classic metaphyseal
lesions — a condition almost exclusive to child abuse.
"They said it was severe child abuse — he squeezed her, he threw her, he
dropped her; anything you can think of to cause that is what he did," the mother said.

Vulnerable time

"That's a pretty horrible number," said Dr. Alice Newton, medical director for
the child protection program at Children's Hospital in Boston. "Quite
often when infants are abused, we see fewer fractures. Even one or two
fractures in a child this age is concerning for abuse."
Newton didn't treat the girl, but spoke generally about injuries to infants.
A child's bones are easier to break because they're smaller, but they're
also more flexible, which adds a certain degree of protection, she said.
Because of that and an infant's lack of mobility, accidental breaks are rare,
but there are several signature injuries doctors look for.
Cracked ribs can indicate a child was squeezed too hard, said Dr. Robert Sege, a
professor of pediatrics at Boston Medical Center and medical director
of the child safety team at the hospital. "Three months is a very
vulnerable period for babies: They cry a lot, they don't sleep, and
they're still growing," Sege said.
Even then, the physical healing process for infants is much shorter than for
adults, sometimes lasting just a few weeks, Newton said.
"Babies are remarkable," Newton said. "Their bones take on the same shape as
they had before. It's a remarkable healing process."

Lingering problems

It was a bright spring afternoon at the grandmother's home on the Outer
Cape. The girl — dressed in blue jeans and a white shirt with a cartoon
mouse on it — bounced around the living room as usual.
She played with her toy kitchen, "making" chicken — her favorite — and
coffee for her mom. Then, with the attention span of a 2-year-old, she
was on to another activity. This time she pushed a miniature green car
along a window frame while looking out the window.
She suddenly whipped around and glared, startled by the click from a
photographer's camera. She hates being snuck up on, her mother said.
It's one of several psychological problems the girl has been battling since the incident.
The first was night terrors, which started when she was 8 months old.
Others have emerged as she gets older.
The girl doesn't know how to soothe herself, according to the family.
Instead, she hits herself, pulls her hair and bites herself. She will
lick the walls, bang her head off things and scratch herself. She even
once tried to pull her eyelids off.
She also has a speech problem. Sometimes she can't articulate words, and they come out scrambled.
Words like "Tinkerbell" and "grandma" instead come out as "Tonka-beel" and "shay-mah."
Both sound like cute baby talk, but are evidence of a speech impediment that her family fears will only worsen with age.
When a child is subjected to trauma this young, the psychological effects
can vary greatly. Because he or she is so young, the child won't
remember the incident in a conscious way, said Margaret Blaustein,
director of training and education at the Trauma Center at the Justice
Resource Institute. The center treats victims of trauma from across the state.
Blaustein has had no experience with
the girl in this case but spoke on general terms about psychological
trauma in very young children.
"At an early age, infants are learning the very basic tasks of learning the world
around them and a traumatic experience can influence that," she said.
"Their body will often hold an imprint of the experience."

The father

At a hearing last month, Lamar Hicks slouched in the gallery in Barnstable
Superior Court. Wearing low-hanging jeans and a dark T-shirt, Hicks
occasionally tapped messages on his cellphone as he waited for the judge
to call his probation case.
He was there for a number of alleged probation violations, including failure to attend the
Cape and Islands Batterers Program — as mandated in his plea agreement —
and for testing positive for cocaine, oxycodone and marijuana in two
separate drug screenings during a five-day period in February. He also
had unsupervised contact with another minor child a day before the
hearing, according to court documents.

Following a brief presentation of evidence from a probation worker, Judge Robert
C. Rufo found Hicks in violation and ordered him held on $10,000 bail.
Hicks' attorney Thomas Yonce didn't respond to multiple phone messages for this article.
It's Hicks' first dustup with law enforcement since Harwich police arrived
at his home in November 2009 days after the girl was brought to the hospital.
Doctors in Boston continued to find
fractures in his daughter when Harwich police Detective Sgt. Dave Jacek
and DCF investigators conducted the first interview.
Hicks denied hurting the girl, according to police reports.
He offered excuses, but they appeared paper-thin to the veteran
investigators. "When you're looking at a little baby with 32 broken
bones, there's not any other way this could have happened," Jacek said.
"This is more than an 'Oops, I rolled over on her' break."
Hicks was indicted in July 2010 and agreed to a plea bargain months later,
according to court documents. He was sentenced to 2½ years in jail, with
one to serve and three years of probation. He was to have no contact
with the victim after his release.
The maximum penalty for assault and battery on a child with substantial injury
is 15 years in prison, according to state law.
Hicks' 2½-year sentence was less than that, but because the victim couldn't
testify and there was no forensic evidence linking him to the injuries,
convicting him could have been a challenge, said Cape and Islands
Assistant District Attorney Lisa Edmonds, who prosecuted the case.
"Oftentimes, we're not necessarily happy about the outcome, but when you're faced
with a case with limited evidence, it's difficult to prove beyond a
reasonable doubt," Edmonds said.
Since the incident, Hicks has had no contact with the girl and limited interaction
with the mother, according to the family.
He's sporadically reached out — including dropping off roses at the mother's
work on Mothers Day 2010 — but nothing substantial, they said.
The family understands that the girl will someday be owed an explanation
about why she feels the way she does. From there, it will be up to her
whether she wants to meet her father, they said.
He's never offered an apology for what happened and the girl's mother isn't
sure it would make a difference. "I know he wouldn't mean it," the
mother said. "(The abuse) happened over months and he never said anything at all."

The road ahead

In the living room the of the grandmother's house, the girl's mother and
grandmother watched as the child ate a small bowl of Cheerios in front
of the TV. The cereal is gone within minutes — half in her mouth, half
on the floor — before she was back to buzzing around the room. The girl
is scheduled to start preschool in Wellfleet in September. They're
encouraged by the girl's gusto to learn and interact with other
children. "I wanna go to skooo," the girl will repeat over and over when the topic is brought up.
The road to recovery for a child depends on a number of factors, but the most important is
his or her support system at home, Blaustein said.
"The capacity to make relationships and feel safe in the body will depend
on his or her experience afterward," she said.
A way to encourage this is for therapists to treat the abused child's family —
to "support his or her support system," she said.
For the family, this means several things.
They began seeking a trauma specialist early on, but it wasn't easy. They
saw child psychologists and trauma specialists, but none worked well for
the girl.
"What we ran into was finding a
therapist to see her was virtually impossible because she (the girl) was
so young," the grandmother said.
But after months of going it alone, the family has decided to give it another try.
Next week, a specialist from the Massachusetts Society for Prevention of
Cruelty to Children is scheduled to meet with the family. Based on their
experiences, the family is cautiously optimistic about the outcome.
It's unknown what symptoms the girl will develop as she gets older. The
concern is that she won't be able to grow up normally, to lead a normal life.
But as the girl pranced around the kitchen table, her bare feet slapping off the tile floor,
those worries seemed far away.
"The important thing is how happy she is now," her grandmother said. "She's a lucky little girl."
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