999 call over 'rag doll' baby

A childminder accused of shaking a baby boy to death sobbed uncontrollably as her 999 call was played to jurors at the Old Bailey today.

Linda Bayfield wept in the dock as the court heard a recording of the call in which she told an emergency service operator that eight-month-old Joshua Osborne was "like a rag doll" and had turned "a deathly colour".

She said: "Every time he gasps I think it's going to be his last one." Bayfield, 54, shut her eyes tightly and sobbed as the 17-minute tape was played to the jury.

The distressed screams of other children in Bayfield's care can be heard on the tape before they were taken into another room.

Joshua's parents, who had left their son with Bayfield that morning at her home in Addiscombe near Croydon left the courtroom as the tape was played.

Accused killer Bayfield claimed she shook baby Joshua "twice, quite firmly, but not violently" when he appeared to stop breathing. Jurors heard the force used, causing brain and eye haemorrhages, was "severe and violent".

Asked by the operator what had happened, Bayfield said: "He started to cry, and then he went screaming and he just, he's gone floppy." She later carried out mouth-tomouth resuscitation but said: "It's like having a rag doll in your hand." Joshua was taken in an ambulance to Croydon's Mayday Hospital but died six days later on 10 July last year. Paramedics who treated Joshua described him as "like marble".

Nicholas Loraine-Smith, for the Crown, said that Bayfield "lost her temper and shook that child so hard even the best efforts by hospital staff were unable to save his life". He added that Bayfield "had to be aware that in violently shaking Joshua" serious injury "was a virtual certainty, if not inevitable".

Bayfield denies murder and an alternative charge of manslaughter. The trial continues.