Bay State Father Works To Keep Others From Making Mistake. BOSTON -- A Massachusetts father convicted of injuring his baby by shaking her too hard is now working to keep other parents from making the same mistake.
Chelsea Forant, 10, of Beverly, was all smiles as she danced with her father, Shon. She feels safe and secure with him now, but when she was 4 months old, she suffered an injury at his hands that left her disabled for the rest of her life.
Shon Forant remembers Chelsea crying, screaming inconsolably.
"I tried talking to her, tried playing around with her, feeding her. It didn't seem like anything was working. It led to the shaking," Forant said.
He shook his daughter so hard that she suffered severe brain damage.
"When I walked in I had found her unresponsive, not breathing, one eye kind of looking up, one eye kind of looking down," he said.
Chelsea was in a coma for two weeks. Forant was convicted of first-degree aggravated domestic assault and sentenced to 3 to 12 years in prison.
He never served any time because of Chelsea's mother.
"He didn't serve jail time because I stood in front of the judge and I asked for that not to happen, because I felt like she had already lost so much quality of life that I wanted him to be out and available," Chelsea's mother, Shannon Byron, said.
The couple broke up, but she has since forgiven him. They took the unusual step of working together, teaching Shaken Baby Syndrome awareness classes, hoping to prevent some of the estimated 1,500 cases per year in the U.S.
"In the matter of, 'Please shut up,' you can cause permanent lifelong disabilities," Byron said.
The likelihood of shaken baby cases is now greater than ever. A new study shows that when the recession began and the stock market dropped, the number of shaken baby cases spiked, going up 55 percent.
Forant and Byron have a message for stressed-out parents: Find stress relief before it's too late.
"Lock yourself in the bathroom, put your iPod in and take a break," Byron said.
They said they are determined to help other parents.
"There's no way that we're going to let her suffer in vain, that we're going to use this for something positive, so that it just didn't happen for no reason," Byron said.
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