Mobilizing to Stop Child Abuse

Mom Displays Image Of Son on Area Buses To Fight Baby-Shaking

The image of Ryan Sanders's tiny frame, cradled in tubes and gauze, looms at commuters. The baby's eyes are closed, and his face is half hidden under tape. He appears, as the words around him imply, shattered.

The troubling image of the Manassas infant first appeared on billboards with the message "Shaking a baby shatters lives." Now, that message has gone mobile. His image has been plastered on the back of public buses. Eight are running in Northern Virginia and eight in the District. Other states have expressed interest in using the display.

The company that sold the advertisement space estimates the image will be seen this month 1.5 million times -- making a loud statement by a boy who cannot speak.

The photo was taken when Ryan was 8 weeks old, on the day in 1992 when a caregiver shook him so violently that she left him permanently disabled. Now 14, he cannot talk, dress himself or brush his teeth alone. He continues to grow physically but has the cognitive ability of a toddler, his mother, Cathy Sanders, said. The bus campaign is her latest effort in a national campaign to spread the word about shaken baby syndrome.

"People need to understand that they can't take things out on children," Sanders said. "People need to understand crying won't kill a baby, shaking a baby will."

She said she knows the image is jarring. She likes that it is.

"I like people to realize this is what a baby looks like when it's been shaken," she said. "I like people to understand it's violent, it's horrific."

Experts describe shaken baby syndrome as a head injury in which vigorous shaking causes the brain to slam back and forth against the skull. Infants are particularly susceptible because their necks are not well developed.

No clear statistics exist on how many shaken baby cases occur each year, but there are thousands, said Craig Futterman, president of the Fort Worth-based Shaken Baby Alliance and associate director of the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit at Inova Fairfax Hospital for Children. At Inova, Futterman said he has seen hundreds of shaken children come in, with up to 50 dying.

"And that's what we see," Futterman said, adding that thousands of cases are misdiagnosed or unreported each year. "This is a somewhat under-recognized disease."

Years after Futterman treated Ryan, he saw a 5-month-old Centerville girl in a similar state visit the intensive care unit.

Photos of Olivia Adelmann look like Ryan's, her mother, Andrea Adelmann, said.