Child protective services removed the five-month-old infant and the couple’s four-year-old son from their home and placed them into foster care due to the false allegations.
A mother and father claimed in a federal lawsuit that Texas authorities took their two children away from them on false child abuse allegations as a result of a flawed investigation. A children's hospital alleged that their infant son had suffered from shaken baby syndrome but an investigation showed the baby's brain injury was sustained during childbirth trauma. The baby's father was charged with felony child abuse, though the charges have since been dismissed. Child protective services removed the five-month-old infant and the couple's four-year-old son from their home and placed them into foster care due to the false allegations.
Lorina Bourne and Jason Troy filed a federal lawsuit against the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services (DFPS) and Ascension Health, which operates Dell Children's Medical Center in Austin, Texas. According to the suit, the hospital improperly assessed their youngest son, Jason Jonathan Troy, in 2015 and misdiagnosed him with shaken baby syndrome when he was five months old, as per documents obtained by ABC News.
The lawsuit filed in the US District Court for the Western District of Texas Austin Division in April stated that their baby went to the hospital after presenting with an enlarged head and vomiting four months after being born. An MRI showed that fluid had accumulated in the baby's brain, which required surgery to drain.
Doctors diagnosed the infant with shaken baby syndrome. The allegations resulted in DFPS removing their two young kids from their home and placing them into foster care.
Bourne and Troy's lawyer hired a doctor two years later to review the baby's medical records. Records showed that the doctor concluded that the baby had "a chronic fluid collection in between his brain and inner skill. The fluid accumulated due to a medical condition of infancy called benign external hydrocephalus."
The doctor hired by the lawyer reviewed birth documents, which revealed that the baby was "born with a collection of blood between his scalp and skull" that "was due to birth-related trauma."
Bourne told ABC News that Ascension Seton Medical Center Austin never informed her that their baby suffered a "birth injury," and only became aware when an attorney reviewed the birth records. Bourne and Troy claim in that suit that had the hospital reviewed their baby's birth records, doctors wouldn't have given a shaken baby syndrome diagnosis.
Troy was charged in 2015 with two counts of felony child abuse by the Travis County District Attorney's Office. His charges were not dismissed until three years later.
Meanwhile, the DFPS removed the two kids from their parents' custody and placed them into foster care on July 20, 2015, for a total of 150 days. According to the lawsuit, the children were removed "based on false pretense," and despite knowing that the baby "had not been abused or neglected," authorities removed them anyway.
Furthermore, the kids were not allowed to stay with other family members and instead were placed into the care of strangers. The lawsuit claimed that Texas DFPS did not explain why the kids weren't allowed to stay with relatives.
The Post Millennial reached out to Dell Children's Medical Center for comment.
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