An Auburn babysitter who shook a then 9-month-old baby so hard he suffered extensive brain damage was sentenced Wednesday in Kent to a maximum of 10 years in prison.

Dotty Marie Reed, 20, was sentenced to 123 months for assaulting Colby Thompson, whom she had been babysitting on May 20, 2010 in Auburn. King County Superior Court Judge Cheryl Carey handed down the sentence this morning at the Norm Maleng Regional Justice Center.

The baby survived but is disabled. Doctors say he may never see, walk or have a normal life.

His mother, Jamie Thompson of Algona, told the judge the babysitter “murdered who my child was supposed to be.”

According to court documents, Reed was babysitting Colby and his older sister on May 20, 2010 at her home when she called 911 to report that the child would not wake up and would stop breathing when she laid him down.

Arriving Valley Regional Fire Authority medics found the baby unresponsive and limp. Medics airlifted the baby to Seattle Children’s Hospital, where doctors diagnosed him with a subdural hematoma, a subarachnoid hemorrhage and retinal hemorrhaging, injuries that didn’t mesh with Reed’s claim that she’d only set him down on the floor too hard. Prosecutors said that only Reed could have caused such injuries.

According to court documents, Reed admitted to detectives that she’d been frustrated with the child for weeks because of his fussiness. She said it appeared that he didn’t like her.

Auburn Police Detective Michelle J. Vojir said in charging documents that Reed picked the boy up roughly from under his arms and put him down on the floor of her bedroom “really hard,” whereupon she heard a sound as his head snapped forward. He began crying and then stopped, appearing to fall asleep.

She told detectives that she was standing by his playpen when she noticed that he wasn’t breathing.”Reed said that was when she realized that she had hurt him. She stated 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.

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 increased transparency so the public could know the licensing status and violations of any given facility before enrolling their child, not after.

The Department of Early Learning 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.

Colby’s parents, Chris and Jamie Thompson, were key to passage of the bill.

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