Case No. ZE22C50109

113.Both Dr Cartlidge and Dr Oates were able to envisage a possible scenario in which S’s right rib and humerus injuries were caused on the same occasion by T jumping, falling or stumbling into him. In the experts’ meeting Dr Cartlidge said that he was “straining” to suggest a mechanism by which this could have happened; in his oral evidence, having viewed one of the videos produced by the parents showing T jumping off the sofa, he said that on reflection a further mechanism might be a stumble which involved T’s knee landing on S’s chest, and the heel of his hand on the mid shaft of the right humerus. 114.Dr Cartlidge thought it was unlikely that T, who at the time was aged two, would have had the emotional or cognitive capacity to understand and then communicate to an adult any event that had taken place in their absence, even if it had caused S to scream unusually loudly. I accept that evidence, which is consistent with the family members’ evidence about T’s level of cognitive development at the time, and indeed my own judicial and practical experience. 115.The evidence leaves open the possibility that an accident took place on the evening of 22 April when the children were left alone in the living-room for a period of up to three minutes. S was crying when the father left the room, and crying when he returned; the father may not have heard any change in the nature of his cry because he was in the kitchen with the door shut and the extractor fan on. The mother almost certainly would not have heard anything because she was upstairs running the bath. 116.One significant difficulty with this scenario is the existence of the earlier rib fracture. The medical evidence is to the effect that a scenario of this nature must be highly unusual, because very many young babies have boisterous older siblings, and yet babies very rarely present at hospital with rib fractures. It follows that for a young baby to be injured by a sibling on two separate occasions must be extraordinarily unlikely. This is compounded by the fact that there is no history of T being left alone with S during the period when the first injury occurred, and it is unlikely that he would have been.