When Alicia Quinney and Joshua Marbury arrived home from their date night, the last thing they expected was to find one of their children in agony; they had enlisted the help of their friend who lives with them to take care of their kids.
According to a Today report, the Oregon couple found their friend asleep on their couch when they entered the house. Their daughter was playing on the other side of the couch with the friend’s dog.
Their other child, Jacob, on the other hand, was upstairs screaming and crying; their friend claimed that he had put the children to bed early and didn’t hear Jacob’s cries.
“The next morning, Jacob had a black eye when he woke up, and new bruises kept swelling up all over his body throughout the day: a hand-shaped, black and blue bruise on the side of his face as well as marks inside his ears and on his arms, back, collarbone, and underneath his eyes,” said the Today report.
Alicia confronted their friend about it, to which he replied that he had fed Jacob a bottle last night and rocked him to sleep.
She knew his friend was lying because “there was a full bottle, not even touched, on the counter the night before,” she said.
Battered toddler Joshua will receive no justice after court dismisses charges; Photo credit: Joshua Marbury
Finally, when Alicia said she was filing a police report, the friend said that he had dropped Jacob on cement while trying to run after her daughter and the dog.
At the hospital where Jacob was examined, the X-rays of his arm and neck came back clear, and the police went back to the couple’s home to take pictures of the house.
The police didn’t find the couple’s friend. Apparently he had gotten scared and fled the state.
“The family took Jacob to a local children’s hospital the following day for more exams and tests, including a CT scan, a full-body X-ray, and even blood tests to determine if Jacob bruises especially easily. All came out clear or negative.”
Because the test results came back clear, the couple were told that the state will not be pursuing charges against Jacob’s alleged abuser.
The Today report said: “In order to prove physical injury under Oregon law, the victim had to suffer ‘impairment of physical condition’—that is, the abuse in question must cause ‘harm to the body that results in a reduction in one’s ability to use the body or a bodily organ for less than a protracted period of time’—or ‘substantial pain,’ which is proven either by the victim’s statement (impossible in the case of a toddler or baby) or by offering circumstantial evidence, such as a behavioural observation by an onlooker such as a parent or doctor, that the child is in substantial pain.”
Frustrated, Jacob’s father Joshua took to Facebook and asked friends for help finding justice for their little boy.
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