A neurologist has warned Cogdill, Hailey's guardian, that she may one day find her lifeless, killed in the night by a giant seizure.

"Every day that I wake her up and she's breathing and smiling at me, that's an accomplishment," said Cogdill, 47, whose family raises Hailey outside a mountain town near Asheville.

It has been eight and a half years since Hailey's mother's boyfriend tried to shake her quiet. She has barely spoken a word since.

No one keeps count of shaken baby survivors such as Hailey. The National Center on Shaken Baby Syndrome, based in Utah, says that for every child who dies from violent shaking, three others survive. In North Carolina, 44 children died from shaken baby syndrome from 1999 through 2003. That would mean about 132 other shaken babies lived.

Many of the survivors are shells of the children they once promised to be. Disabilities render about a third of them completely dependent, said Dr. Desmond Runyan, professor and chairman of social medicine at the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Medicine. Many others struggle with learning disabilities, tantrums and poor coordination.

Cogdill and her husband, Robert, put their lives on hold to love a child who loves back with more pinches than hugs. Hailey's childhood is frozen in infancy. She sees little and can't swallow solid food.

Her life hangs on an exhaustive and expensive routine of doctor visits and therapy sessions. Medicaid, the government health care program, has been billed nearly $400,000 for her medical needs.

It's crazy to think, Cogdill says: All this heartache and money because someone lost his cool with a crying baby.

The end of crying

Cogdill hardly recognized 7-month-old Hailey the night she was shaken in March 1997. She lay tethered to a ventilator at Memorial Mission Hospital in Asheville. A tube snaked from a tiny hole in her swollen head. Bruises burned deep purple on her chest.

That night, Hailey's mother, Lisa Seals, had left her at home with her boyfriend, Joseph Keith Sehion, then 24, while she ran to the store to buy diapers. Hailey wailed with an earache.

Sehion later told Buncombe County Sheriff's Lt. Rocky Owenby that he had grabbed Hailey from her swing in the bedroom and dropped her onto his bed. She kept crying, so Sehion squeezed her in a tight hug, Owenby said, reading from Sehion's signed confession. That didn't work, either, so he picked her up and shook her hard.

Sehion later pleaded guilty to felony child abuse and spent a little more than two years in prison. Efforts to reach him failed. His grandmother, Jean Edney of Swannanoa, said he had left the state to look for work.

The shaking had slammed Hailey's brain against her skull, severing axons -- vital "wires" that send signals between brain cells. Babies typically don't develop extra protection around these axons until about age 2 1/2, making their brains susceptible to tears, said Gordon Worley, clinical professor of neurological development at Duke University.

Hailey's brain swelled, hindering the flow of blood. The cells most starved for blood support the most sophisticated human functions: reasoning, coordination and memory. Without blood, those cells die.

Cogdill spent a sleepless night in the hospital with Hailey's family, lifelong friends to whom she is distantly related. The next morning she dragged herself to a final exam at Mars Hill College, where she studied computer science and worked as a secretary.

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