In a split second on May 20, 2010, Dottie Reed, 18, let her frustrations with the fussy 8-month-old baby she was sitting at her Auburn home boil over. She set him down on the floor hard, once, maybe twice, and spun him around.

That’s all it took.

Doctors at Children’s Hospital later told Colby Thompson’s parents that the shock had snapped the baby’s neck back, grievously injuring his brain, breaking it apart. Doctors said he probably would not survive the swelling inside his skull, and that they should prepare themselves to say goodbye.

Somehow Colby lived, but the once happy, gurgling baby, mom’s “little ham” with the big smile and bright life ahead is gone. In his place is a boy whose parents have to hook him to a feeding tube five times a day so he doesn’t suck food into his lungs. Who is prone to episodes of seizure-like “storming” from the neurological damage he sustained. Who can’t talk, probably can’t see, and suffers from muscle stiffness, which has dislocated his hips.

Last week Superior Court Judge Cheryl Carey sentenced the woman who did all that to the child in her care to the maximum 123 months – more than 10 years – in prison, minus the nearly two years she already has served. Reed, now, 20 pleaded guilty to assault last month.

As Jamie Thompson told the courtroom at the Norm Maleng Regional Justice Center, her son will never run, play or pull bright ornaments off the Christmas tree as he should be doing. He probably won’t marry or have a family. The damage to his brain is so extensive, she said, doctors have warned her and Chris not to expect him to grow much taller than he has already.

“She murdered who my child was supposed to be,” Thompson cried softly, as the baby in his stroller lolled his eyes from side to side, perhaps seeing nothing more than shades of black and white. Considering the lasting damage Reed did to her child, Thompson said before Carey pronounced sentence, anything other than the stiffest penalty would not be fair.

“She slammed my 8-month-old child,” Thompson sobbed. “He couldn’t tell her, ‘No, please don’t hurt me.’ She knew what she was doing. She’s a mother herself. She knows babies cry.”

Between the round-the-clock care Colby needs, the medications that keep him alive and unexpected trips to the hospital, family life at the Thompson home in Algona necessarily centers on him. Mom and dad spend up to 20 hours each day caring for their son, now two and a half years old.

“We don’t live a normal life anymore,” Jamie Thompson said.

According to court documents, Reed was babysitting Colby and his older sister, Jewel, that day at her home in Auburn when she called 911 to report that the child would not wake up and that his breathing stopped whenever she set him down.

Injuries sustained

Valley Regional Fire Authority medics found the baby unresponsive and limp. Medics airlifted him to Seattle Children’s Hospital, where doctors diagnosed him with a subdural hematoma, a subarachnoid hemorrhage and retinal hemorrhaging. Such injuries didn’t mesh with Reed’s initial claims of innocence. Police said that only she could have caused such injuries.

According to court documents, Reed told detectives that she’d been frustrated with Colby for weeks because of his fussiness. It appeared, Reed said, that he didn’t like her.

Auburn Police Detective Michelle J. Vojir wrote in court documents that Reed told her she had picked Colby up roughly from under his arms and put him down on the floor of her bedroom “really hard.” At that moment, she said, she heard a sound as the baby’s head snapped forward. He began crying but stopped and appeared to be falling asleep.

Reed told detectives that she had been standing next to Colby’s playpen when she noticed that he wasn’t breathing.

“Reed said that was when she realized that she had hurt him. She said that she put (him) down too hard and turned him around too quick and hard, and that shook him. Reed stated that when she did it, she wasn’t really thinking about what she was doing, that it just happened,” Vojir wrote.

But the Thompsons say it didn’t have to happen. Why didn’t Reed tell Colby’s parents about her frustrations so they could arrange for another sitter, instead of telling them two days earlier that everything was great? Or, if she had been feeling overwhelmed, why didn’t she call Chris Thompson, who worked five minutes away from her home?

The couple trusted Reed and defended her against suspicion the first few days after Colby was injured. Jamie Thompson had thanked her repeatedly for calling 911. They learned from the television news that she had been arrested and what police were saying she had done to their baby.

“We felt betrayed,” Chris Thompson said.

Questionable choice?

Some people have questioned the Thompsons for answering Reed’s Craigslist ad, which described her Christian family, her multi-generational support and that she didn’t drink or smoke.

“People have said that we should be in jail too because we chose someone from Craigslist,” Jamie Thompson said. “You know, we did did talk to family. We did talk to friends. I did background checks on her. It wasn’t just the first person we found. I emailed back and forth with her. I talked with her several times on the phone. She came to our house to meet our kids with her kid and see how things worked. We met again another time, and she and her mom tried it out at our house. One of our kids was home sick and another was home from college, so there was somebody here.

“It’s not like we called up an ad on Tuesday evening, and Wednesday morning she was watching my kids,” Jamie Thompson said.

Chris Thompson said they learned only after the fact that there were family interventions with Child Protective Services in Reed’s background.”But that’s the stuff that nobody could ever find out then. That’s why we pushed for licensing,” he said

Last year Gov. Chris Gregoire signed the Colby Thompson Act of 2011 to protect children and ease the minds of concerned parents throughout the state. An expansion of existing law, the Act increases transparency so the public can know the licensing status and violations of any given day care facility before enrolling their child, not after.

The Department of Early Learning has already required most child care providers to be licensed. Few avenues, however, existed for parents to research the licensing history, including violations, of prospective facilities. The Thompsons were key to passage of the bill.

Could they forgive Reed? “I can’t say never,” Jamie Thompson said. “But right now, I can’t foresee a time when I could.”