Mom gets state prison for abusing infant

WEST CHESTER » A young Valley mother who squeezed her infant son so hard when she was angry with him that she left the child with multiple rib fractures asked a Common Pleas judge Wednesday to allow her to return to her family and begin “being a mom.”

“I would do anything I can to be a mother to both of my kids,” said Brianna Lynam in a sentencing hearing for the assault charges she pleaded guilty to earlier this year. “I don’t want to be in jail anymore. I am not trying to make an excuse, I am trying to be a better mom.”

Her request for leniency, however, was met instead with a stern sentence from Judge Jacqueline Carroll Cody, who ordered her incarcerated in a state prison for three to 10 years. The prosecution had been seeking a sentence of four to eight years, while Lynam’s attorney had asked that she be allowed to serve a term of less than two years in Chester County Prison.

Cody, in handing down her sentence, said she recognized that Lynam, 19, had faced a struggle as a young mother who had little help in dealing with a newborn infant, and that Lynam’s own experience with a difficult childhood had played a role in how she reacted to her parenting problems.

“That is what happens when people don’t have good parents,” Cody said. They end up continuing the same behavior. But the judge said Lynam’s abuse of her 3-month-old son was such a “serious, serious matter” that “I can’t take it lightly.

“The damage you caused to your child is something you cannot undo,” Cody told Lynam. “What you did was inexcusable. You made a series of decisions to hurt your child and not ask for help.”

In June 2018, the young boy was brought to Brandywine Hospital by his grandmother after the older woman noticed he had trouble breathing and had suspicious bruises on his foot, according to a scenario laid out by Deputy District Attorney Erin O’Brien of the D.A.’s Child Abuse Unit, who prosecuted the case.

X-rays of the child at the hospital showed as many as nine rib fractures, with subsequent examination of A.I. DuPont Hospital in Delaware showed three more fractures that had healed. Lynam became a suspect because she was the primary caregiver for the children O’Brien said, and had been heard threatening to kill the infant because the father had not been helping her care for him.

When Lynam, who was 18 at the time, was questioned by Chester County Detectives and Valley police, she admitted that she had become angry at the boy when she thought he was being difficult with her attempts to get him to sit in his chair. She would force him physically to sit straight, and then would grab him by the torso and squeeze his rib cage, she said — showing the investigators how she did so by holding a baby doll.

The injuries the child sustained showed that he had been abused on multiple occasions, since some of the fractures were older than others, the prosecutor contended, saying Lynam had shown no remorse or regret for her actions, and “does not acknowledge she caused her child pain and suffering.”

O’Brien argued that Lynam’s statements that she had no one to help her care for the child were contradicted by assistance she had been offered by her pediatrician before the child was born, as well as by counselors who offered her parenting resources afterwards.

While free on bail after her June 28, 2018 arrest, Lynam and the injured boy’s father reconciled and they had another baby. The father, Joshua Boggs, told Cody that he and Lynam had “been through some toxic things,” but that the two of them had been working to create a good home during the time since her arrest.

“I know in her heart she is not a monster,” Boggs said in asking the judge to keep her from a long prison sentence. “She just needs help. She just wants to get better. And I can’t be a mother and a father.”

Assistant Public Defender Peter Jurs, who represented Lynam, asked Cody to cap his client’s sentence at 11 ½ to 23 months in county prison, delaying her parole date until the end of the term and giving her a lengthy period of probation afterwards.