Deaths of two young children in Fort Worth trigger investigations by authorities
Authorities are investigating the deaths of two children, a 4-year-old boy and a 3-year-old girl, at a local hospital on Saturday.
Fort Worth police officers arrived at a residence in the 3300 block of Bonaventure Boulevard to meet an ambulance where a 4-year-old boy, Stetson Blackburn, was receiving CPR. The child was subsequently taken to Cook Children’s Medical Center for treatment, according to investigators.
Stetson was pronounced dead at Cook Children’s shortly before 10:40 a.m. Saturday, a news release from the Tarrant County Medical Examiner’s Office showed.
In an unrelated incident, a 3-year-old girl also died Saturday at Cook Children’s Medical Center after she was driven there in a private vehicle, authorities said.
Eriykah Taylor died about 2 p.m., according to the Tarrant County Medical Examiner’s Office. She had bruises on her body, according to a Fort Worth police call sheet.
The cause and manner of death are pending the results of autopsies in each case.
Crimes Against Children Unit detectives are investigating the two deaths, according to police.
Eriykah and Stetson both lived in Fort Worth.
Police have not confirmed if these two deaths involve foul play, but officials with Cook Children’s have said they have seen a spike in child abuse cases in the past week.
“An unfortunate development in the increase in child abuse cases we’re seeing,” the hospital tweeted on Monday. “As of Saturday, we saw 7 cases of severe child abuse. Two of those children died. All between March 17-21.”
Hospital officials said they believe the spike in child abuse cases is linked to stress related to the coronavirus outbreak.
“We usually only average six deaths from abuse a year at Cook Children’s and now we’ve had two children die on the same day,” said Jamye Coffman, medical director of the Cook Children’s Center for Prevention and Child Abuse and Neglect and the CARE team, in a news release. “This is an issue related to stress. We are seeing it from all over from urban areas to more rural counties.”
For doctors, the increase in abuse cases didn’t come as a total surprise, according to the release. During the recession in 2008-09, Cook Children’s saw its patients’ leading cause of death from trauma change from motor vehicle crashes to abusive head trauma.
“We knew an increase in abuse was going to occur, but this happened faster than we ever imagined,” said Christi Thornhill, director of the Trauma Program, the CARE team and Fostering Health at Cook Children’s. “I mean this happened in a week and these are really bad abuse cases.”
This story includes information from Star-Telegram archives.
