Yob violently shook nine-month-old after getting stressed playing X-box
BY ASHLIE McANALLY A THUG who violently shook a baby girl leaving her badly brain damaged after getting “stressed” playing his X-box was yesterday jailed for almost five years.
The injuries inflicted on the nine-month-old by Dale Thomson will have “lifelong implications”.
Thomson, who assaulted the tot in April, had years earlier attacked a monthold boy after he woke early.
At the High Court in Glasgow, 27-year-old Thomson pleaded guilty to attacking the girl to her severe injury, permanent impairment and danger of her life at a flat in Dundee.
He also admitted assaulting the boy at another house in the city in October 2010.
The court heard that after the girl’s mum left for work, Thomson had been playing the X-box online with a teenage boy while the baby slept.
Prosecutor Paul Kearney said that during a text exchange Thomson told the tot’s mum the game was “stressful”.
She urged him to turn it off and asked him “not to take his feelings out on others”.
Thomson later made a 999 call saying the girl’s eyes were “rolling” and that she was not breathing.
She was rushed to hospital and Thomson claimed he had found her “floppy” in her cot.
The court heard she suffered seizures in hospital.
Doctors suspected meningitis but she was transferred to Edinburgh’s Sick Children’s Hospital where they found bleeding on the brain, “indicative of non-accidental injury”. Mr Kearney said: “The (girl’s) injury ... was severe. It will have lifelong implications impacting on her movement, learning, speech and vision.”
She needs “high levels of care” and attends a specialist unit every day.
In the 2010 incident, Thomson grabbed the boy “with some force … without supporting the (child’s) head” after he woke up crying early one morning.
Emma Toner, defending, said Thomson was “flooded with guilt and remorse”.
Judge Lord Burns jailed him for four years and eight months and ordered he be supervised for three years on his release.