Child C — the Panel finds inadequate resuscitation and an unrecognised bowel obstruction
The prosecution’s claim: The Crown alleged Child C, an extremely premature infant, deteriorated and died because Lucy Letby deliberately introduced air via a nasogastric tube. The prosecution treated the deterioration as anomalous and as requiring a deliberate-act explanation.
Prosecution claim
The Crown alleged Child C, an extremely premature infant, deteriorated and died because Lucy Letby deliberately introduced air via a nasogastric tube. The prosecution treated the deterioration as anomalous and as requiring a deliberate-act explanation.
Counter-evidence
The Panel's conclusions on Child C are twofold, and neither involves deliberate harm. Child C died after a decision was taken to discontinue support, following a resuscitation the Panel considers inadequate — it went on for at least twenty minutes. And in the period before the collapse there had been signs of intermittent bowel obstruction that went unrecognised. Independent paediatric review of the primary record (Dr Martyn Pitman and others) had separately highlighted the antenatal picture — reversed end-diastolic flow on Doppler ultrasound recorded approximately three weeks before delivery — and infection findings in the notes, both of which raise the baseline collapse risk for an extremely premature infant. None of this was foregrounded for a jury that was invited to treat the deterioration as anomalous, and therefore as criminal.
Key point: The Panel's findings for Child C are a resuscitation it considers inadequate and a bowel obstruction nobody recognised. Those are failures of care, not acts of harm.
What the jury heard
The Crown emphasised the alleged NG-tube air-injection mechanism and Letby's presence at the deterioration. The jury did not hear that the earlier signs of intermittent bowel obstruction had been missed, or that the resuscitation itself would later be assessed as inadequate.
What the Panel says
The Panel finds that Child C died after a decision to discontinue support taken following an inadequate resuscitation of at least twenty minutes, and that earlier signs of intermittent bowel obstruction had gone unrecognised. It does not find deliberate harm.
What independent experts add
- The Panel's Child C findings are directed at the care the baby received — a resuscitation it considers inadequate, and a bowel obstruction that was not recognised — not at the nurse convicted of murdering him.
- Dr Martyn Pitman has analysed the antenatal Doppler findings and the postnatal infection record case-by-case across Children A, B, C, D, O and P.
- The Panel found no evidence of deliberate air injection in the cases where the Crown alleged it; our analysis at /analysis/ng-tube-physiology explains why the air-injection pathway is physiologically unsound.