The officer stepped outside with another officer.
A few minutes later, he came back and asked me to tell him everything from the beginning.
I told him about the crying.
I told him about the diapers and formula.
I told him how my husband had become angry whenever the baby needed something, and how that anger had turned into violence. I told him what I had seen him do to our child and what happened to me when I tried to intervene.
Then the officer asked a question that made me stop.
“Did anyone else witness what happened?”
I thought about my mother-in-law standing there while I held my injured baby.
“She did.”
He nodded.
“And she just admitted on the phone that she knew he became violent when he was angry.”
That sentence changed the way the night felt.
My mother-in-law had thought she was helping her son by explaining his behavior. Instead, she had given investigators another piece of the story.
