Woman Accepts Plea Deal for Death of Man She Allegedly Hurt as Baby

A former babysitter pleaded guilty to manslaughter on Wednesday in Florida in connection to the 2019 death of a man she was accused of severely injuring as a baby nearly four decades ago.
Terry McKirchy, 62, faced a first-degree murder charge for the death of Benjamin Dowling, who passed away at 35 after a lifetime of severe disabilities. The conditions stemmed from a brain hemorrhage in 1984 when he was just 5 months old, an injury investigators believe McKirchy caused by shaking him at her home in suburban Fort Lauderdale.
McKirchy, who now lives in Sugar Land, Texas, was indicted with first-degree murder by a Broward County grand jury in 2019 after an autopsy linked Dowling’s death to the injuries he sustained as an infant. Despite facing a potential life sentence, McKirchy has maintained her innocence, denying that she ever harmed Dowling.
However, according to the Associated Press (AP), McKirchy on Wednesday accepted a plea deal for the death of Dowling, and in a letter read in court she admitted to repeatedly striking the child.
Newsweek reached out to the Broward Prosecutor’s office via email on Wednesday for comment.
McKirchy, who had been out on $100,000 bail since her indictment, voluntarily entered the Broward County Jail on May 29. Since accepting the plea deal on Wednesday, her sentence remains unclear.
This case marks the second time McKirchy has faced legal consequences related to Dowling’s injuries. In 1985, she took a plea deal for attempted murder, resulting in an unusually lenient sentence. At the time, McKirchy, pregnant with her third child, avoided a prison sentence of 12 to 17 years, instead serving weekends in jail until her baby was born, followed by three years of probation. Despite the deal, McKirchy continued to assert her innocence, stating that her “conscience is clear.”
Dowling’s parents, Rae and Joe Dowling, had hired McKirchy, then 22, to care for Benjamin while they worked. On July 3, 1984, Rae Dowling found her infant son limp and unresponsive after picking him up from McKirchy’s home. Doctors diagnosed Benjamin with a brain hemorrhage consistent with severe shaking, leading to McKirchy’s arrest.
The Dowlings have previously described their son’s life as a series of challenges, marked by multiple surgeries, including the insertion of metal rods along his spine and a dependency on a feeding tube. However, the family has continued to remind others of how much Benjamin was loved.
“Benjamin would never know how much he was loved and could never tell others of his love for them,” the family said, per the AP. “Benjamin did smile when he was around his family, although he could never verbalize anything, we believe he knew who we were and that we were working hard to help him.”
Meanwhile, the case highlights concerns around shaken baby syndrome, once a widely accepted diagnosis in the 1970s.
However, it has come under scrutiny in recent years as research has suggested that the symptoms associated with the syndrome—brain swelling, surface bleeding and retinal hemorrhages—can also result from genetic conditions, diseases and accidents. This evolving understanding has led to the overturning of 29 individuals convicted of shaken baby syndrome since 2000, the AP reported.
“While there is no question that shaking is abusive, there is a question over whether that type of abuse causes the type of injuries that have long been associated with it,” Katherine Judson, executive director of the Center for Integrity in Forensic Sciences, told the AP.
The American Academy of Pediatrics now uses the term “abusive head trauma” and continues to emphasize the importance of recognizing potential signs of abuse, such as bruising in specific areas of a child’s body. Approximately 1 in 3,000 babies under the age of one is abused annually by shaking, with about a quarter of those cases resulting in death.