Neil was devastated. The infant had gotten sick on his watch, and the young man suffered both guilt and grief. At 5 A.M., cops put an exhausted Neil in the back of their squad car and grilled him. Neil acknowledged that he often playfully tossed Cody into the air to make him giggle. The police taped the conversation but admitted later that they didn’t start recording until they’d prompted Neil to incriminate himself.
Neil was trying to be helpful. The mentally challenged man was sleep deprived, probably in shock, and had a tendency to get confused, especially in stressful situations. This was the second time in twelve hours he’d been questioned, and he’d already stated there was nothing unusual about his play with Cody that day. But they kept repeating questions and didn’t seem pleased with his answers.
Neil eventually told them what they wanted to hear. He finally said he’d shaken the baby. Shaken him once. But Cody’s death was not caused by a gentle jiggle or bouncing on a knee. Did Neil understand what they meant by shaking? Probably not. Dr. Page testified that Cody’s injuries were the result of twenty seconds or more of vigorous shaking. Apparently, the officer didn’t understand SBS either because he fixated on the tossing game—a potentially dangerous activity but not the cause of Cody’s death. Officer Stone testified, “Mr. Munson told me that he often would play with the baby by tossing the baby in the air and catching the baby. He described it as setting the baby on a knee and kind of tossing him up in the air and catching him. He advised me this is how he often played with the baby. I asked him if anything out of the normal happened this day, if he had played with the baby any differently, and he said basically no . . .” Unsatisfied with Neil’s response, Officer Stone pressured him. “When I asked him if he could’ve thrown the baby higher or whatever, he said, yeah, he could have. I tried to get—I asked him distance-wise and if it could have been a foot. He said, yeah, maybe it was—it was even a little over that. I asked him how many times he had thrown the baby in the air and caught him, and he said he would estimate five.”
Neil had affectionately played the game with Cody to get him to smile, and while the National Center on Shaken Baby Syndrome (NCSBS) warns that activities such as tossing a baby in the air and bouncing a baby on the knee, “can be dangerous and are not recommended, they will likely not cause SBS injuries.”
Someone had shaken Cody violently, but there was no proof Neil had done it. And no one could prove when Cody was shaken. SBS “symptoms can start quickly, especially in a badly injured child. Other times, it may take a few days for swelling to cause symptoms,” reports Cigna, a global health service company.
Several people had interacted with Cody in the days leading up to his death. Cody’s own mother had claimed she’d dropped him. Had she done more than that? Was Shanna fed up after five months of Cody’s nonstop wailing? Had she shaken him and then concocted the dropping story to make possible injuries appear accidental?
No one knows the answer to that, but observers noticed that Shanna didn’t behave like a typical grieving mother. Within a day or so of Cody’s death, Gloria ran into her at Walmart and was shocked by her cheerful mood. Shanna was with an older couple, and the woman smiled at Gloria and said, “We’re treating Shanna to a new wardrobe today!”
Gloria was taken aback when she saw how excited Shanna was about the shopping spree. “Shanna looked so happy, she didn’t act like a mother who’d just lost her baby.”
Raymond, too, was baffled by Shanna’s behavior. Numb with grief, he was more confused than ever as she bounced between him and Neil. But Neil was soon out of the picture. Police decided Neil had hurt Cody, and they arrested him. After he went to jail, Shanna slept with Raymond. It was the night before the funeral. One of Raymond’s darkest moments came as he watched Shanna by Cody’s tiny coffin, with a small group gathered around her. She whipped out photos of Neil’s baby. “They were passing the photos around,” remembers Ray. It hurt him to see Shanna, smiling proudly at the photos of this other baby,