A 16-year-old teenage dad jailed for life for biting his baby’s nose before violently swinging him to death.
Neighbours recalled hearing ‘blood-curdling screams’ as Doulton Phillips killed his son Reggie in a drink-fuelled rage, Metro UK reports.
The teenager, now 17, could be named for the first time after jurors found him guilty of murder.
His identity was protected while he stood trial alongside his girlfriend Alannah Skinner, 19, the baby’s mother.
Skinner, who was 18 at the time, was jailed for 30 months after being found guilty of child cruelty for failing to protect or seek help for her baby.
Phillips fractured the baby’s skull and ribs, leaving him with a broken leg and bruises, a court heard. The ‘deliberate’ attack happened in the early hours of February 11 at Skinner’s one-room flat in Southampton after they spent the night drinking vodka and beer at a neighbour’s party.
Prosecutor Adam Feest QC said the series of injuries showed how the baby met with a ‘violent end’.
‘Residents across the road recall hearing what they described as a blood-curdling or painful scream coming from the flat at about 3am,’ he added.
One neighbour heard ‘a gut-wrenching cry of pain coming from a baby’ and the ‘sort of screaming that turned her stomach’, he said.
When the baby was taken to hospital, Phillips told a neighbour: ‘What have I done?’ But he later claimed to police that Reggie accidentally fell from the sofa when having his nappy changed, or fell from his arms while the couple were arguing.
Mr Feest said the explanation could not account for the ‘severity or multiplicity of the injuries sustained’. He added: ‘They are more in keeping with a violent shaking or swinging, or indeed both.
The nature is such that the person inflicting them must have intended to cause really serious injuries or death.’ Justice Robin Spencer sentenced Phillips for life with a minimum of 15 years, and told him:
‘The injuries you inflicted on this six week old baby were truly appalling. ‘The jury were spared the photographs of his injuries. I regarded it as my duty to look at them. ‘Your own description of his visible injuries when you saw him and held him at hospital after he had died, was that he looked as though he had been beaten up. That was an apt description.
Such wicked cruelty towards a helpless tiny baby is almost beyond belief but I’m satisfied that it must be the reality of what happened.’
The trial heard he pushed his girlfriend to the ground during a row while she was still pregnant, which left her with grazes on her face, and made abusive phone calls, calling her a ‘slut’ and a ‘slag’ and claiming the child was not his.He told the court he had memory problems and did not remember returning to her flat after drinking Corona and Budweiser lager as well as vodka before taking the drug MDMA.
Skinner was captured on camera in hospital saying the baby had fallen accidentally, and told a court she did not think the child needed immediate medical attention
