There Must Be a Witness by Sue Bell Cobb with Nick Cenegy

Author:Sue Bell Cobb with Nick Cenegy
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781588383464
Publisher: NewSouth Books
Published: 2017-10-03T00:00:00+00:00

13

Cementing Child Advocacy

While we worked feverishly to establish Children First, a small child in Cullman County was enduring a daily barrage of abuse from her stepfather.

No abuse or neglect case is without horror. Some that I encountered, however, pushed the limits of what I thought one human was capable of inflicting upon another. In later years, when our group of advocates would be embroiled in a fight to pass legislation to create a trust fund for children—which included substantial funding for programs to prevent child abuse—my thoughts would constantly return to this case. It cemented my commitment to fighting for children. To say it even more plainly: it kept me from quitting.

By the time I was sworn into the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals in 1995, I had seen my share of suffering recounted in courtrooms all over Alabama.

About two years into my tenure on the appellate court, we were asked to rule on an unforgettable case.1 As with many of those cases, the appellant’s filing argued that prosecutors had made procedural errors during the trial. The court unanimously found that claim to be untrue, and the conviction was affirmed. But the story lingers with me to this day.

The appeal was filed by Billy Glen Biles Jr., who had been convicted in Cullman Circuit Court two years before of reckless manslaughter and child abuse. The victim was his three-year-old stepdaughter, Hannah Kelly.

In the summer of 1995, Biles, age twenty-seven, married Hannah’s mother, Tina. Once married, he moved in with his new wife and stepdaughter. Hannah was a month shy of three years old. By all accounts, the little girl was healthy and happy. Before the summer was over, she would be dead.

Things unwound quickly for the new family. Within the first two months, neighbors heard yelling and crying coming from the family’s apartment. There were loud noises that sounded like someone hitting a wall or striking another person, according to testimony. Friends and family noticed that Hannah became withdrawn and was often frightened.

About a month after her third birthday, Hannah arrived at the Children’s Hospital in Birmingham. Her right ear was bleeding. A physician treated her for a laceration to the eardrum. Biles told the doctor that he had been cleaning Hannah’s ears with a cotton swab. Hannah had jumped suddenly, and the swab shot deep into her ear, Biles said. The doctor noticed blood in the ear canal but did not see any other injuries on the little girl. He irrigated the ear, wrote them a prescription, and referred them to a pediatric ear, nose, and throat specialist.

When they arrived for their appointment with the specialist two days later, the doctor saw a small blood clot in Hannah’s right ear canal. He also noticed that on the outside of the ear there was a hematoma—blood underneath the skin. This type of injury was unusual on little children, he said. It was normally the result of a shearing force—a twisting or pulling—like that sometimes experienced by wrestlers or people who have had their ears boxed.

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