Abusive Head Trauma in Infants and Children

Lori Frasier is the medical director of Medical Assessment at the Center for Safe and Healthy Families at Primary Children's Medical Center and associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Utah School of Medicine in Salt Lake City, Utah. Formerly, she was an assistant professor of Child Health and the director of the Child Protection Program and Division of General Pediatrics at the University of Missouri-Columbia. Dr. Frasier graduated from the University of Utah College of Medicine in 1995, completed her pediatric residency at the Children's Hospital and Medical Center/University of Washington in Seattle, Washington, and held a fellowship at the University of Washington's Sexual Assault Center. Dr. Frasier has authored several articles and chapters and lectured locally, regionally, and nationally on subjects related to child maltreatment.

Randell Alexander is a professor of pediatrics at the University of Florida and the Morehouse School of Medicine. He currently serves as chief of the Division of Child Protection and Forensic Pediatrics and interim chief of the Division of Developmental Pediatrics at the University of Florida-Jacksonville. In addition, he is the statewide medical director of child protections teams for the Department of Health's Children's Medical Services and is part of the International Advisory Board for the National Center on Shaken Baby Syndrome. He has also served as vice chair of the US Advisory Board on Child Abuse and Neglect, on the American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on Child Abuse and Neglect, and the boards of the American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children (APSAC) and Prevent Child Abuse America. Dr. Alexander has served on state child death review committees in Iowa, Georgia, and Florida, as well as on two regional child death review committees. He is an active researcher who lectures widely and testifies frequently in major child abuse cases throughout the country.

Robert Parrish began his legal career in the Utah Attorney General's Office in 1980. In 1983, after representing the Utah Department of Public Safety as its sole counsel and presenting criminal appeals before the Utah Supreme Court, he became a prosecutor and managed trials of all kinds before specializing in child abuse prosecution in the late 1980s. Parrish has worked on both child protection cases and criminal cases involving proof of child abuse issues. While deputy director of the National Center on Shaken Baby Syndrome from July 2000 to 2002, Parrish consulted on hundreds of cases all over the world, authored a training curriculum for law enforcement and CPS investigators, and wrote articles and chapters for several prosecution and medical texts. Parrish has presented training in England, Australia, and throughout the United States on a variety of topics relating to abusive head trauma in children and focusing on the legal system's role in responding to this severe form of child abuse. In 2002, Parrish returned to state government as a Guardian ad Litem, representing abused, neglected, and delinquent children in juvenile court and managing six other attorneys and staff.

James Claude Upshaw (Jamie) Downs, M.D., is coastal Georgia's first Regional Medical Examiner. He has been continuously employed as a Medical Examiner since 1989 and was Alabama's State Forensics Director and Chief Medical Examiner from 1998 to 2002. He has lectured extensively in the field of forensic pathology and has presented at numerous national and international meetings in the fields of anatomic and forensic pathology. He is a consultant to the FBI Behavioral Science Unit in Quantico, Virginia, having authored four chapters in their manual on Managing Death Investigation, and was primary author of the FBI's acclaimed Forensic Investigator's Trauma Atlas. He serves on the Forensic Committee of the International Association of Chiefs of Police. He received his doctor of medicine degree and his residency training in anatomic and clinical pathology, and his fellowship in forensic pathology from the Medical University of South Carolina (Charleston). He is board certified in anatomic, clinical, and forensic pathology.

The book, even by itself, has already been a tremendous resource and helped me prepare for my upcoming trial!

Sandra L. Murphy
Assistant County Attorney
Cerro Gordo County Attorney's Office, Iowa

Combining current knowledge on head trauma from several professional fields is an outstanding feature of this book; it will support clinicians, pathologists, and other medical personnel working with professionals in other disciplines as they diagnose and investigate cases of both abusive and unintentional head trauma in children.

Robert W. Block, MD, FAAP
Professor and Daniel C. Plunket Chair
Department of Pediatrics
Oklahoma University

The case examples used throughout provide an excellent way to understand the issues and challenges that are routinely encountered in the investigation of these types of child abuse incidents. This publication should be part of every child abuse investigator’s library.

Lt Bill Walsh
Dallas Police Department
Dallas, Texas

I read the chapter on prosecution on the eve of a child homicide trial and found that the factors in the Appendix described my case to a tee. It succinctly summed up the evidence a prosecutor needs to identify who abused the child and why.

Jeannette R. Gallagher
Deputy County Attorney
Maricopa County Attorney’s Office
Phoenix, Arizona