Man gets no prison time in son's death

Jessie Ullom will pay for his son's death with a $1,000 check to reimburse the baby's grandmother for the funeral.

Ullom, a former Army staff sergeant who served in Iraq, took responsibility Thursday for shaking his son Christian Norris so violently that the child was blind and never walked or talked in the 2 1/2 years he survived afterward. Judge William C. Gore Jr. ordered Ullom, 25, to pay for the funeral and added a year to the probation Ullom is already serving for abusing Christian.

Gore did not want to send Ullom to jail.

"Some people will look at your defendant as a baby killer; others will say he is the authentic American hero," Gore, a Superior Court judge from Columbus County, said to Ullom's attorney. "At this point, this far removed from the actual act ... it appears to not be in the interest of justice to put him in prison."

Prosecutors and Ullom's lawyer, Jim Levinson, decided he would plead no contest to involuntary manslaughter but left the sentence to the judge. Prosecutor Elisabeth Dresel argued that he should get the maximum sentence, almost two years in prison.

The judge's sentence didn't surprise Christian's grandmother, Linda Norris, who cared for Christian after the shaking, rocking him through more than 50 seizures a day and grinding a diet of pills each morning. Ullom avoided prison in 2004 when he was convicted of abusing Christian; she said she expected nothing different when prosecutors charged Ullom again after Christian died.

"All he got was a slap on the wrist," Norris told the judge. "But him going to prison is not going to bring my baby back."

A News & Observer investigation last year found that many baby shakers escape jail time. Statewide, 40 percent of those who shook babies to death from 1999 through 2003 never went to prison. Of the 44 babies who died of shaken baby syndrome during those years, five, like Christian, succumbed to their injuries months or years after the shaking.

For Christian, severe brain injuries made it difficult to swallow; particles of food slipped into his lungs. He ate through a tube in his belly the last year of his life, but his lungs were already damaged. A respiratory infection killed him in December 2004, a few weeks shy of his third birthday.

"He was a sweet little boy that suffered when he didn't have to," Norris said to the judge, shaking away tears that started to sting her eyes. "He tried to live, and I did my best. He'd just be a beautiful 4-year-old boy running around right now."

Ullom has never admitted in court that he shook his son. In 2004 and again Thursday, Ullom pleaded no contest as part of a deal his attorney struck with a prosecutor. He told a social worker at a hospital in 2002 that he might have picked the baby up too hard and noticed Christian's head flop back and forth, a prosecutor said.

Forceful shaking

To cause shaken baby syndrome, the shaking must be so forceful "that individuals observing it would recognize it as dangerous and likely to kill the child," the American Society of Pediatrics says.

In court Thursday, Ullom, thin and now balding, looked solemn in khakis and a white button-down shirt. It's the first time he stood before a judge while not wearing his Army dress greens. He was discharged from the Army last summer.

Military officials have admitted that Ullom should have been kicked out after his child-abuse conviction in March 2004. Federal law and military policy ban soldiers convicted of domestic violence -- including child abuse -- from being sent overseas, because they can't legally carry a gun. Ullom spent much of 2004 with the 82nd Airborne in Iraq.

"It's not only cost him his son, but this has cost him his career," said Levinson, Ullom's attorney.

Before sentencing Thursday, Levinson bragged about his client's stellar military service. He told the judge that Ullom led a team of soldiers on home raids in Iraq and confiscated an untold number of illegal weapons.

The judge thanked Ullom for his military service, then chastised him for having had sex with Christian's mother, who was 15 years old when the two started dating. He said Ullom should have been convicted of statutory rape.

"The root cause of this is Mr. Ullom having sex with a child too young to give consent," Gore said, ordering him to stay away from girls under age 18 while on probation. Gore also lectured him about being rough with children, saying that "you can't make a Marine or a soldier out of a child at the age of 3 months."

"If I could order you not to have any more children, constitutionally, I would," he added.

District Attorney Tom Lock sat on a courtroom bench and shook his head as the judge let Ullom go free. He partly blamed himself.

"I've certainly carried a lot of guilt, because we didn't send him to prison the first time," Lock said.