One evening in August of 2023, I watched a woman step up to the mic during a meeting of local government officials in Allentown, Pennsylvania.

She was young, early 20s, strikingly pretty, wearing a pale pink blazer. She's short, five foot nothing,

so she had to stand on her tiptoes to reach the microphone.

She had five minutes to convey basically any parent's nightmare.

My two-month-old son was happily drinking milk from his bottle when he quickly started choking,

turned blue, and went limp. My boyfriend transported our son to the changing table as I grabbed an anti-choking

device and my boyfriend began assembling it. I never ran so fast up the stairs screaming at the top of my

lungs for help. She described the panic in the house, a baby not breathing. She and her boyfriend,

the father of the child, lived with her parents. Everyone was home when the baby

started choking. My father rushed downstairs and immediately started doing chest compressions

as I dialed 911. Two pumps to the device and my son was conscious gasping for air and coughing

up milk. It worked. Thank God, they thought. They were relieved, but rattled. They wanted to make sure the baby was okay, so they sent him to the ER.

We saved his life that night. But upon arriving at Lehigh Valley Hospital, the diagnosis quickly became something so different, something nobody could have ever prepared me for.

A lot can be said in five minutes, it turns out, and she still had four to go.

She described how the whole family went to the hospital.

She and her boyfriend, her parents, later, his parents too.

But after their baby was examined, she and her boyfriend were asked to leave,

because it turned out one of the doctors had a theory.

She stated to my father and mother-in-law that we are young first-time parents who got frustrated with our baby and violently shook him to make him stop crying.

And a confession would only make things easier for us.

Their story about the milk and the choking and the life-saving device, the hospital was saying,

that's a lie, and that these young parents should just admit that they'd lost their patients and shaken the baby, hard.

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