A teenage father has been jailed for eight years after admitting killing his 23-day-old daughter by shaking her.
Thomas Haining, who was aged 19 at the time, had been charged with murdering Mikayla, but prosecutors accepted his guilty plea to a lesser charge of culpable homicide.
Edinburgh’s High
Court heard he had Googled “What happens when a newborn is shake [sic] hard”, “newborn in a coma” and “baby took a panic attack and now she’s unresponsive” just an hour before he woke Ms Davies to say Mikayla had “gone floppy”.
She later died after suffering several broken ribs and a skull fracture as a result of her head being hit on a door.
Haining, now 21, was yesterday sentenced to eight years in prison after a murder charge was reduced to culpable homicide, to which he pleaded guilty.
Paramedics were called to the family home in Inverness on June 8, 2017, and took Mikayla to hospital where she was placed in intensive care with a ventilator, having suffered a cardiac arrest as a result of the head trauma.
She died there just three weeks later. Medical experts who reviewed CT images of her body concluded she suffered brain injuries which were “catastrophic and un-survivable”, the court was told.
Later the same day she was taken off life support and and died in her mother’s arms at 4.46pm.
After two years of denial, Crown prosecutors accepted a guilty plea from Haining on September 5.
Shelagh McCall QC, representing Haining, told the court he was prepared for a lengthy period in jail and that he now “hated” himself. She claimed the killer panicked after the event but he now wishes he had come clean about his actions sooner.
Ms McCall said: “He described himself as reflecting that he should have ‘manned up’ at that time and told the truth, as a clear acknowledgement from Mr Haining that he was solely responsible for what happened and that he ought to have told the truth far sooner than he did.” She added: “He is preparing for a significant custodial sentence, he feels this is justified due to the severity of his actions, stating that he is disgusted with himself, that he hated himself for what he has done.”