Chrishon was taken to the hospital where he was diagnosed with injuries consistent with Shaken Baby Syndrome (SBS). The baby’s brain swelled, and cerebral palsy set in. The child survived, but was severely debilitated.

On January 15, 2002, the Army filed charges seeking to court-martial Morings on a charge of aggravated assault. He went to trial in a military court in August 2002.

Robert Sanders, an agent with the Army Criminal Investigation Division (CID) testified that he received the initial call about the child, and that he contacted the FBI because there was an injured child, a member of the military, and a civilian spouse. He said that Chiquita was ruled out as a suspect based on her interviews.

Chiquita testified that on the evening of August 3, 2001, Morings attended a birthday party and returned home about 2 a.m. She said she got up at 6 a.m. because she had reserve duty that morning. By the time she was ready for work, Chrishon and their 18-month-old daughter Claudia were awake. She said she gave Claudia a “sippy cup” and Chrishon a bottle, and left before 7 a.m.

She said Morings called her about 8:30 a.m. and told her that he had awakened when he heard Chrishon crying. He told her that the children were fine, but that "Chrishon was a little on the fussy side." She returned home at approximately 9 a.m. She said Chrishon was lying down and was not fussy. She picked him up and carried him around the house. When he got "a little fussy," she tried to feed him, and he drank a little bit of formula. She said she put him in the swing, but he "didn't want to do that" so she carried him around the house. Chiquita said she took Chrishon into his bedroom and laid him on a pillow on her lap, where he fell asleep. She then returned to her reserve unit at about 10:30 a.m.

She said she was returning home for lunch at 11:45 a.m. when Morings called her to say that something was wrong with Chrishon. She hung up, and Morings called back a minute later and said something was “really, really wrong with the baby.” She said he told her that he had gone into Chrishon’s room because the baby was making noise and found Chrishon with his arms in the air and his eyes rolling back. He was barely breathing. She said Morings told her that he thought Chrishon was choking, so he picked him up and patted him on the back. Chrishon then went limp, and Morings told her that he had “lost it” and didn’t know what to do. She said he told her that the baby’s heart was still beating.

Chiquita testified that when she got home, Chrishon was laying on the bed, "a little on the pale side," and taking “gasping breaths." She said she told Morings to call 911. She said that because she was in training to be a nurse, she tried to resuscitate Chrishon, but she could not remember the procedure. She said that she was "giving him breaths too hard" and noticed that there was a little bit of blood coming out of his mouth. Then an emergency medical technician (EMT) guided her through the procedure by telephone, and she continued to attempt to resuscitate Chrishon.

She testified that Morings was "a little frantic," but she "just lost it.” She said Morings tried to compose her, telling her everything was going to be all right.

The prosecution asked Chiquita if she told CID who she thought caused Chrishon’s injuries. She responded by invoking her Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination because “people have already mentioned that I could have been the one to do it.”

Asked if, during a discussion with the prosecutor, she had told the CID that she thought Morings injured Chrishon, she said, “But if I still say that now, I’m still saying that and I’m being recorded and I’m under oath and if I say what I said then, I’m still going to held accountable for it now. So I’ll decide to plead the Fifth.”

The military judge told her, “Well, you can answer the question as to what you told [CID] then, that doesn’t mean that you’re endorsing it now or that you’re putting yourself at risk, so I want you to answer his question.”

She replied, “I told Agent Sanders that I was not in the house and that I did not know what happened and the only people in the house at that time was Claudia and Chrishon and that I didn’t do it.”

She also testified that she had admitted to CID that she had dropped Chrishon on the floor when she was feeding him in the middle of the night about three and a half weeks prior to August 4. She also admitted that she told a pediatrician that Chrishon had rolled off the bed a week or two later.

During cross-examination, she said that she went to speak to CID “because my mother has a lot of control over me and she was telling me that if I didn’t go and tell them what they wanted to hear and say that my husband did it, then I was going to be behind bars and she was going to have nothing to do with me, and they was going to take all of my kids away, and Chrishon was already dying. So I was just trying to make her happy and I would do what I thought was right. I didn’t want to go and talk to him, but she told me I better go because if I don’t they’re going to come pick [me] up in the middle of the might and hold me for questioning again and possibly put me in jail.”

Chiquita also admitted that she told CID that she was a person who got really angry, and Morings was not. She testified that Morings was a wonderful parent who was very involved with the children.

Yvette Ramirez, an El Paso County Family Court services investigator, testified that she met with Mornings at the hospital on August 5. He provided a description of the previous day’s events and said that the only time he had shaken Chrishon was when he checked on the baby and Chrishon wasn’t breathing. Ramirez testified that Morings told her that he “got the baby by the shoulders, he didn’t lift the baby up, the baby stayed on the bed, but that she shook the baby trying to get a response from him, but that that was the only time.”

During cross-examination, Ramirez said she knew Chrishon was a suspected SBS case. Asked if the father was the perpetrator in “most” SBS cases, Ramirez said, “I believe they have done some studies that indicate that in most cases the father is the perpetrator. Yes.”

She said that after talking to Chiquita and Morings, “I did think he was the perpetrator after [he] gave me his explanation and the doctors gave me their information. Yes, I did believe he was the perpetrator.”

She said her belief was based on the discrepancy of Moring’s account and the serious injuries to Chrishon. She said the discrepancy could be explained if Chiquita had been the person who shook the baby.

Dr. Clifford Janke was on duty in the emergency room at the William Beaumont Army Medical Center on base when Chrishon arrived. He testified that the baby was intubated and stabilized. He said Chrishon was not breathing on his own when he arrived. Dr. Janke said he summoned Dr. Christine Legler, a staff pediatrician, who then assumed primary care of the child. Dr. Janke testified that Chrishon was somewhat responsive and would open his eyes to touch.

Dr. Legler testified that she spoke with Morings and Chiquita. Morings reported that Chrishon had been "fussy" throughout the morning. Legler also testified that she had to re-intubate Chrishon because he had not been properly intubated initially.

Dr. Alex Lobera, a radiologist, conducted the initial reading of CT scans and x-rays of Chrishon. He testified that his initial reading, report and subsequent report to military law enforcement several weeks after the incident was that the child suffered from a hypoxic-ischemic event, but he observed no intracranial bleeding on the CT scan.

Dr. Shankar Sundrani, a neurosurgeon, testified that Morings told him that after Chrishon went limp, he tried to shake him to see if he would respond. Dr. Sundrani said Morings told him that Chrishon was "extremely fussy" and that he was trying his best to console him, but he would not calm down. Dr. Sundrani testified that Chrishon's injuries were consistent with Shaken Baby Syndrome.

On cross-examination, Dr. Sundrani stated that, based on the information from Morings and the medical evidence from the CT scan, the injury would have occurred sometime between 8 a.m. and 11 a.m. on August 4. Asked by defense counsel what would happen immediately after the baby was shaken, Dr. Sundrani replied: “It depends on the severity of the injury. If it's a pure Shaken Baby Syndrome, the baby would cry from the pain, from whatever was happening in his head from like blood clot to clotting, and very soon over a period of time, anywhere from 4 to 12 hours, there will occur some swelling in the brain and the brain when it swells up tends to push the membranes around it much harder, so the patient will complain of a lot of pain and cry in the case of a baby. And will begin to go into lighter stages of coma, become lethargic, stop breathing, vomit, it will have projectile vomiting, and become limp or pale, and then become comatose.”

Dr. Sundrani testified that it was “quite possible” in the case of a brain hemorrhage, a baby could lose consciousness, regain it, and then lose consciousness again because the structure of the baby's skull would allow for the brain to expand more so than an adult's skull. He also said that the baby would definitely exhibit abnormal behavior which “could very well be screaming and not moving the arms and legs in a normal fashion.”

Dr. Sundrani testified that the symptoms reported by Morings, including fussiness, agitation, crying, “are the usual symptoms of a baby who is uncomfortable or has stress from raised inter-cranial pressure, raised pressure in the head, usually behaves that way and then turns pale and become lethargic and limp and that's very consistent with – that presentation is very consistent with a shaken baby.”

Dr. Gilbert Handal, chief of Pediatrics at Thomason Hospital in El Paso and Regional Chair of Pediatrics at Texas Tech University, testified as an expert in the field of pediatrics and pediatric intensive care. Dr. Handal testified that when Chrishon was transferred from Beaumont's emergency room to Thomason Hospital, he treated Chrishon for "some time." He testified that Chrishon’s injuries were consistent with SBS.

The prosecutor asked, “Sir, is there any sort of consensus within the medical community as to who is most likely prone to shake their child?”

Dr. Handal replied, “Well, the most frequent cases of shaken baby syndrome [involve]…boyfriends, stepparents, and parents. And from the parents, usually the male parent is more frequent than the female.”

During cross-examination, Dr. Handal testified that it was difficult for him to estimate the time of the injury. “When I saw the child at 7:30 at night, already the child had been almost eight hours in the system already being treated…So, you know, I could not attest to the fact of the timing [in] which it happened. If I had received the child at 1:00 o'clock for example and had seen the brain edema develop in front of my eyes, which unfortunately I have witnessed on occasions, I would have said, “Well, four to six hours back this would have happened.’”

“You know, it's very difficult. Let me tell you why it's difficult,” Dr. Handal said. “Because the child also showed symptoms and signs of hypoxia. I mean at the time the child arrived to Beaumont with the blood gasses you could see that the child was hypoxic. That he had low oxygenation in the blood and the brain, of course. And the whole body was suffering of lack of oxygenation, and you know already that the child had anemia when we saw him at 7:30 at night…So what I'm trying to tell you here is that there is a series of factors here that are compounding the trauma itself and that's usually the scenario we're faced with. So for me to tell exactly at what time what happened it's very difficult. I know whatever it was that happened to the child hours before, it happened many hours before I saw the child...[Y]ou cannot be exact on the hour. The only thing that's important is that when you see a baby that has had a bleeding, because the child had the bleeding. When they put in the trachea tube there was blood in the stomach. When you see somebody who really is not breathing and is hypoxic and when you see somebody who has had a progressive presentation, you assume that it's been at least four hours. So that's why I feel that what happened to this baby must have happened early in the morning – 9:00, 8:00, somewhere around there.”

Dr. Handal agreed that just because the case involved a shaken baby, he could not conclude that the male parent was the perpetrator. The defense asked about the different possible reactions a child with the injuries Chrishon had would exhibit immediately after being shaken.

Dr. Handal replied, “It’s very difficult to be specific because there are several degrees of Shaken Baby Syndromes. For example…you can shake a baby and it may become a little fussy and nothing else happens. On the other side you can shake a baby and cause a deep, deep, severe damage to the baby. But the damage will not happen immediately. . . . The…bleeding is very slow. Then the swelling doesn't happen immediately. It happens progressively. So usually what you tend to see is a child that is fussy, that's irritable, that's getting pale and suffering…his heart rate’s gone up, and eventually…he'll get lethargic, and he will be comatose. I mean, the progression might take – might stop at any time depending upon the damage or might continue and progress towards severe brain edema and death, depending upon the kind of shaking the baby had, and like I said before, the other problems the baby might be exhibiting.”

He added, “So really it’s not a black or white thing. It’s usually a thing, a process that really would vary from child to child.”

Dr. Handal also testified that while it was theoretically possible for shaking to cause an immediate seizure, he had never seen or read about such a case. He said that it was very unlikely for the baby to go to sleep after being shaken, although a person without medical training could mistake a seizure for falling asleep.

Dr. Carole Jenny, a pediatrician, testified as an expert in pediatric child abuse. She testified that Chrishon had brain bleeding and retinal hemorrhaging, which were among the typical triad of symptoms of SBS.

Dr. Frank Quattromani, a pediatric radiologist, testified that he had reviewed the CT scans taken at Thomason hospital, and that he believed the injuries were the result of SBS.

The defense case focused on the fact that both Morings and Chiquita were present during the time period in which Chrishon's injuries were inflicted and that both had the ability and the opportunity to cause the injury. Dr. Tamara Grigsby, a forensic pediatrician, testified for the defense that she agreed that Chrishon had been shaken. But she said that there was no way to tell who had shaken the baby. She testified that the most specific time frame she could identify for the injury's occurrence would be some time that morning.

During cross-examination, the prosecution asked Dr. Grigsby about medical studies which had been conducted about abusive head trauma in infants.

“And isn't it also true that the study, ma'am, indicated that male perpetrators outnumbered female perpetrators by 2.2 to 1.0?”

Dr. Grigsby replied, “That's the 2.2 to 1.0; yes.”

“And in your experience, ma'am, as a forensic pediatrician, in your experience, ma'am, the most common perpetrators are young and male?”

“That has been my experience,” Dr. Grigsby said.

The prosecutor also asked, “And didn't the study also conclude that male caretakers are a greater risk to abuse infants?”

“Yes, based on their findings in that review of 151 cases,” Dr. Grigsby said.

“And didn't the data, ma'am, also conclude that of those caretakers who were admitted to injuring the children, 97 percent of the abusers were with the child at the time of the symptom onset?” the prosecutor asked.

“Yes,” Grigsby said.

When the prosecutor asked if the study suggested that symptoms occur soon after the shaking and did not evolve over a period of hours or days, Dr. Grigsby said, “Well, they do qualify that. It's important to understand that study, just so everybody gets it straight. Of the 151 cases they could only kind of look at those that they had admissions and there were 37 cases where there was admissions, you know, people admitted that they had shaken the baby. So in those 37 cases, 36 of them were with the child at the time the child became severely symptomatic and that's the 97%. So it's of those 37.”

Dr. Grigsby also said the study concluded that caretakers “may deny the onset of symptoms while the child was in their care in order to escape culpability.”

Numerous defense witnesses attested that Morings was a good father.

Morings testified that about 20 minutes after Chiquita went back to her unit at 10:30 a.m., he heard Chrishon crying. He said he tried to console the baby by doing the same things he had done earlier. After putting Chrishon back to bed, he returned to the living room and began playing games on the computer with his daughter.

Morings said he checked on Chrishon after 10 minutes and the baby seemed to be asleep, opened his eyes, and then dozed off again. About 10 minutes later, Morings said that he heard Chrishon “screech.” He went into Chrishon’s room, where he found the baby with his arms in an unusual position, his eyes rolled back in his head, his mouth open, and he was gasping for breath. Morings said he picked up Chrishon, laid him on his shoulder, and patted his back. At that point, the child went limp.

Morings said he shook Chrishon in an attempt to revive him, with his hands supporting Chrishon's head. When his efforts were unsuccessful, he called Chiquita, who was already on her way home. He denied shaking Chrishon prior to the injury’s manifestation, and testified that, except for being unusually fussy, the baby’s behavior was normal that morning.

During cross- examination, Morings was asked about Chiquita’s statement to CID that ”because she didn't do it, you must have.” Morings said that Chiquita was “pressured into it."

During closing argument, the prosecution emphasized statistics regarding male perpetrators, saying, “You also heard the testimony from Dr. Handal. By far one of the most learned and recognized experts here in El Paso…He also testified that the consensus in the medical community as to who mostly shakes infants is a male…Additionally, let's take a moment to look at the studies of which [Dr. Grigsby] is familiar…Male perpetrators outnumber female perpetrators 2.2 to 1.0. Male caretakers, namely biological fathers, are at a greater risk to abuse infants. And finally let's take a moment to look at her real-world experience. She confirmed what Dr. Handal testified to; that the most common perpetrators of child abuse of Shaken Baby Syndrome are those who are young and those who are male.”

The prosecutor continued, “The experts said it, ladies and gentlemen. The common trigger for shaking a baby is a baby's crying. The prototypical shaker, if you will, is a young male.”

During the defense closing argument, Moring’s attorney declared, “Statistics. He must be guilty because it's always the male that does it. He must be guilty because 97.2 times the one that is with the baby when he starts exhibiting symptoms is the one that did it…The only problem is…statistically it doesn't hold. Logically it doesn't hold, and it would be injustice to base a conviction upon that evidence in any way, even to consider it. Statistically it doesn't hold. Everyone here, an officer of the United States Army has been through extensive education and has probably taken statistics at one point; the very basics. To understand the results of any statistical study you have to know the basis of the study, you have to know the questions asked, you have to know the sample group. Most of these studies on Shaken Baby Syndrome involved confessed cases, cases with admissions, cases where someone said, 'I did it.' You don't have that here. No one has said I did it.”

The defense did not challenge the testimony that Chrishon was a victim of SBS. Instead, the defense argued that Chiquita also fit the profile of a perpetrator to some extent because she was a young parent, with an admitted temper, who provided a suspect explanation of the baby previously falling off of the bed.

The defense did not object to the introduction of the profile evidence or the prosecution’s use of such evidence during argument. The defense did not request, and the military judge did not provide, any sort of limiting instruction on the use of the evidence that males were the most likely perpetrators in shaken baby cases.

On August 9, 2002, Morings was convicted of aggravated assault. He was sentenced to six months in custody, reduction to the lowest possible rank, a dishonorable discharge and forfeiture of pay and benefits.

While he was in military prison, Chiquita and their daughter, no longer with any financial support or medical benefits, went to stay with Morings’s family in Gates County, North Carolina. On November 24, 2002, Chrishon died. He was 17 months old. His body was buried in a cemetery in Virginia, just over the state line from Gates County. The family was too poor to afford a headstone. There was no autopsy performed.

Local law enforcement heard about the baby’s death. Gates County District Attorney Frank Parrish later told The Raleigh News and Observer, “That’s murder. This child never had a shot.” Meanwhile, Morings was released after serving five months and rejoined his family in Gates County. He remained on involuntary leave while his conviction was being appealed.

On January 31, 2006, the U.S. Army Court of Criminal Appeals vacated his conviction and ordered a new trial. The court ruled that the presentation of testimony regarding the propensity of males to shake babies was improper.

“The use of the evidence was plain and obvious error because it was geared to establishing the servicemember's guilt because he was young and male, rather than rebutting any negative implication about the investigation,” the court ruled. “The admission of the evidence resulted in material prejudice to a substantial right because the service member's right to be presumed innocent was materially prejudiced by the argument that he was the perpetrator because males were more likely to commit such crimes.”

The prosecution’s argument, “coupled with a lack of a limiting instruction, left the [jury] panel members with the clear impression that the profile evidence that male parents were twice as likely to shake their babies as female parents was a legitimate consideration when deciding whether appellant had harmed his son,” the court said. “Based on the state of the evidence in this case, we are convinced that the combination of the erroneous admission of the profile evidence, the improper argument of trial counsel using the evidence to establish appellant's guilt, and the military judge's failure to give a limiting instruction had an unfair impact.”

In the summer of 2006, the Army contacted Parrish, who sent his chief investigator to search the cemetery for Chrishon’s grave. Ultimately, the search focused on a small patch of land in the cemetery. On January 25, 2007, a court order was obtained, and investigators began digging. They found a child’s casket containing the body of a child, and took it to Dr. John Butts, the state’s chief medical examiner, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Butts took a sample from the body’s femur and teeth. In February 2007, military law enforcement obtained search warrants to obtain buccal swabs of Chiquita and Morings. Those samples were sent off for DNA testing. In July 2007, the body was identified as Chrishon.

Butts then conducted an autopsy and concluded that the baby had died as a result of SBS complications. He said the manner of death was homicide and the cause was “cardiopulmonary failure” related to “shaken baby syndrome.” He also noted, “From historical information it would appear this death is undoubtedly due to complications of severe cerebral injury which was initially judged due to inflicted trauma – shaking.”

The casket was reburied, and in July 2007, Morings was called back to Fort Bliss to return to active duty. On August 7, the Army again sought to court-martial Morings – this time on a charge of murder. Military lawyers Elizabeth Walker and her husband, Dan Everett were appointed to defend Morings at his retrial which began in June 2009. Unlike the first trial, their argument was that Chrishon was not a victim of SBS. Their theory was that Chrishon's injuries were not a result of SBS but could have been caused by reinjuries from birth trauma or from Chiquita’s accidental dropping of him in the weeks before the child was hospitalized.

They obtained their own experts in pediatric ophthalmology, forensic pathology, and radiology. They also consulted with Dr. Faris A. Bandak, a biomechanical engineer.

In 2005, Dr. Bandak had conducted a biomechanical analysis of the consequences of shaking infants to determine if the fragile infant neck could withstand the SBS-defined forces without injury. He had proposed that any SBS analysis required knowledge and training in injury biomechanics, a discipline not taught in medical school. He had stated that the “[l]ack of education and experience in injury biomechanics, amongst other factors, has led in practices to the proliferation and propagation of inaccurate and sometimes erroneous information on SBS injury in the literature.”

Dr. Bandak had used velocity levels cited in by SBS researchers, which measured the amount of force required to shake an infant hard enough to cause retinal hemorrhaging, subdural hematomas, and brain edema, to evaluate the effects such forces would have on an infant's neck. Among Dr. Bandak’s conclusions were that head acceleration and velocity levels commonly reported for SBS generated forces were far too great for the infant neck to withstand injury.

“Given that cervical spine injury is reported to be a rare clinical finding in SBS cases, the results of this study indicate an SBS diagnosis in an infant with intracerebral [injury] but without cervical spine or brain stem injury is questionable and other causes of the intracerebral injury must be considered,” he concluded. “Cervical spine and/or brain stem injury should be included amongst the factors considered in the determination of consistency of reported history in cases where infant shaking is suspected. It should be kept in mind that such injury is not exclusive to shaking as the sole mechanical cause. Traumatic shaking is just one of the causes.”

The prosecution called its witnesses from the first trial.

In one significant development, Dr. Quattromani testified that the scans showed severe edema and bleeding within the brain, contrary to what Dr. Lobera had said. Specifically, he noticed bleeding on the left frontal area of the brain. He said it was difficult to tell exactly where in the brain the blood was located. He also testified that he no longer believed SBS was the cause of Chrishon’s injuries. He said that over the years he had done more reading on SBS and no longer could definitively state the child's injuries were the result of SBS.

The defense called its own experts.

Dr. John Plunkett, a forensic pathologist who had emerged as a leading critic of SBS, testified and disagreed with Butts’s conclusion that Chrishon was a victim of SBS.

Dr. Ronald Uscinski, a neurologist and neurosurgeon, testified that Chrishon could have suffered his injuries when he had been accidentally dropped by his mother.

Dr. Frank Scribbick, an ophthalmologist and ophthalmic pathologist, explained possible alternative explanations for the retinal hemorrhaging. Dr. Michael Krasnokutsky, a neuroradiologist, testified that based upon his review of the CT scans and x-rays, he could not conclude that Chrishon was a victim of SBS.

Dr. Bandak ultimately did not testify, but was present at the court-martial to assist the defense in the cross-examinations of the prosecution witnesses.

In June 2009, Morings was acquitted.