Child fatally injured during dad's weekend visitation--and Dad is AWOL (Chatanooga, Tennessee)

I saw an earlier media report on this case, but decided to wait and see until more information came out.

Well, well. How INTERESTING that UNNAMED DAD has utterly disappeared, has gone totally AWOL, after his girlfriend brought his 3-year-old son to the hospital with "trouble breathing." Seems the boy also had bruises that "didn't add up." The child died shortly thereafter. (Young children who are subjected to abusive head trauma often develop breathing problems, and these injuries are often fatal.) The police have already interviewed the girlfriend and the mom. But get this: the boy was injured while in the weekend custody of his father. Police hasten to assure us that the missing Daddy isn't "a suspect," but you don't have to be a weatherman to see which way the wind is blowing on this one.

http://www.newschannel9.com/news/child-990920-boy-detectives.html

UPDATE: Child's Death Leads Detectives to Search for Father

May 03, 2010 6:38 PM
Tanya Mendis

What happened to a 3-year-old boy who died over the weekend? That's the question detectives are asking today, as they continue to look for the little boy's father.

According to Chattanooga Police, at this point this is still a death investigation. No one's been charged, but there are some things that just don't add up, and detectives are hoping the father can do some explaining.

At T.C. Thompson over the weekend a woman brought her boyfriend's son to the hospital. The 3-year-old was having trouble breathing. A short time later, the hospital notified Chattanooga Police that the child had died.

Doctors found bruises on the boy that didn't add up.

"There were things that just didn't look right, there were questionable marks," Lieutenant Kim Noorbergen says.

According to Noorbergen, the boy had been in his father's custody, but his girlfriend was the only one to be found. Detectives tell us it took more than 24 hours to find and notify the boy's mother, but they still can't find the father. He has not been named a suspect, but the fact that it took so long to find one parent and the other is still missing in action, puts detectives in unfamiliar territory.

"Most people you think, if something happens to your child, they're there immediately; if not, they're on the way," Noorbergen says. "This is tough for us, because not only are we investigating the death of this child, we've now had to take time to find the parents of this child."

At the Hamilton County Forensic Center, we found detectives waiting to find out what killed the boy; a report that's still not ready. But if there was the abuse doctors suspect the next question becomes, at whose hands?

"We're dealing with a child here, a 3 year old child, and that's heartwrenching to begin with. But when you have the added stress of the investigation of trying to locate a parent of a child that's terrible," Noorbergen says.