Mum found blood on baby son’s face, Letby trial hears

A MOTHER wept yesterday as she told of the moment she was urged to leave her screaming newborn son by a nurse accused of his murder.

The woman told a court she arrived to visit the baby – one of ‘perfect’ premature twins – when she heard ‘horrendous’ crying from the older boy, who also had blood around his mouth and chin.

The mother, who cannot be named for legal reasons, said Lucy Letby reassured her and she agreed to leave him in the neonatal unit as she believed the nurse ‘knew better’ and she ‘trusted her completely’.

Within hours the child, referred to as Baby E, was dead. Letby, 32, is accused of murdering him by injecting air into his bloodstream. She is also accused of the attempted murder of younger twin Baby F the next day.

Baby E’s mother had been taking expressed breast milk to the boys at the Countess of Chester Hospital at around 9pm on August 3, 2015. ‘I could hear my son crying and it was like nothing I had heard before,’ she said. ‘I walked over to see blood coming out of his mouth and I panicked.

‘It was a sound that should not have come from a tiny baby. It was horrendous. It was more of a scream than a cry.’

The mother told Manchester Crown Court Letby was the only other person in the room. When she asked what was wrong, Letby said the blood was from his feeding tube irritating his throat. The nurse urged her to return to the ward where she was recovering from her Caesarean section. But shortly before 11pm, the court heard, a midwife told her the baby had collapsed.

Sobbing, the mother told jurors: ‘I knew there was something wrong but I left.’

Baby E was declared dead in the early hours of August 4. His mother told how Letby bathed her dead son as she was too distraught to do it.

WhatsApp messages between Letby and another nurse in the hours after Baby E’s death were also read out to the court. In one, the off-duty nurse says to Letby: ‘ You seem to have been having such very bad luck.’ Letby replied: ‘Not a lot I can do really. He had a massive haemorrhage. Could have happened to any baby.’

Letby, of Hereford, denies the murder of seven babies and the attempted murder of ten others. The case continues.