A 31-year-old North Little Rock man has been sentenced to seven years in prison for inflicting fatal injuries on his infant daughter.
Kwuan Marquette Bryant pleaded guilty to manslaughter before Circuit Judge Barry Sims in exchange for the seven-year term.
Bryant was arrested almost a year to the day after 5-month-old Kennedy Kaye Bryant died at Arkansas Children's Hospital in May 2017. The baby was unconscious and struggling to breathe when Bryant and his girlfriend -- Brittani Young, Kennedy's mother -- carried her to the hospital.
Court filings show the girl was not breathing and had no pulse when she arrived at the hospital, with doctors noting she had cloudy eyes, a low core temperature and bruises on her lower stomach. The baby never woke up.
Young, 28, was not charged. Kennedy was the youngest of her children, who were ages 7, 5 and 2 at the time. Bryant is the father of two of Young's children.
Young told police at the hospital that she left for work at 8 a.m. and returned home about noon to find Kennedy crying.
Young said she was on the phone when her oldest child told her that she thought something was wrong with the baby. Young said that when she picked the infant up, the baby went limp and appeared to be gasping for air, so the family took her to the hospital.
Bryant told police that he woke that day around 11 a.m., then fed the baby. She threw up, so he and one of the other children helped him clean it up. He said he put the infant in the room where her sisters were watching TV and went back to bed until Young got home from work.
An autopsy showed Kennedy had died of blunt force trauma to the stomach, with doctors noting bruises on the abdominal wall, "extensive" lacerations of the small intestine that caused bleeding in the abdominal cavity, and microscopic evidence of older injuries.
Dr. Karen Farst, a pediatric abuse specialist, testified at a dependency-neglect hearing that a skeletal scan showed bone fractures, among them rib fractures that were at least two weeks old, plus leg injuries that could not be dated. Farst said the fractures were unusual for an infant and typically only happened as the result of an inflicted injury but would not have killed the child.
Court records show that Department of Human Services had twice received reports about the children. Six weeks before Kennedy died, the infant was found to have two black eyes and a swollen jaw. Bryant first denied knowing what had happened to her, but later told investigators that she had fallen off an ottoman. Investigators found the report of child abuse to be unsubstantiated.
In January 2015, the agency received a report that Bryant had punched the children and whipped the second-oldest child, then age 3, with a phone cord, inflicting welts on her legs. Bryant and Young received monthly Department of Human Services visits but did not complete parenting classes, and the case was closed 10 months later.
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