Life felt nearly perfect for parents Eric and Angela Weingrad when they completed their family by providing their young daughter, Stella, with a new baby brother.
When their newborn son, Holton, was 11 weeks old, the couple decided it was OK to leave him in the care of their nanny, who had been with them and watched their daughter for the past two years.
It was the first time she had ever watched the infant on her own.
As the Weingrads describe, they had gone to the mall, to buy Holton Christmas clothes.
“We were no more than seven steps into Nordstrom when her phone rang,” Eric said.
Eric grabbed Angela’s cell phone and heard the frantic behavior of the receptionist from their apartment complex on the other end.
” ‘Your son isn’t breathing, he is on his way to the hospital right now, and you should go there,’ ” Eric heard her say.
Upon arrival at the hospital, Holton was in a hospital bed, crying uncontrollably.
“He was making these weird guttural sounds, and his eyes were rolling back and he was clenching his fists,” Eric said.
Doctors had determined that Holton, who was not even three months old at the time, was having seizures.
“The next time we saw him, he was completely unconscious. He looked like a science project,” Eric said. “He had wires all over him, he had a breathing tube. It was the worst sight of my life. ”
As it turned out, Holton had suffered a cracked skull when he was admitted into the hospital. He had experienced a traumatic brain injury and had temporarily stopped breathing. The couple’s nanny came by the hospital a few days after the initial ordeal, and what she had to say shocked Holton’s parents.
“She says she left him on the couch, and she left the room and heard a ‘bang’ and came back out, he was on the floor and he was crying, and she picked him up to soothe him, and she rocked him, and he just stopped breathing,” Eric said.