“It meant a lot to me to be able to be there,” Eappen said, “I knew that it was going to be very traumatic. The Dhekanes were not allowed to watch the trial because they were scheduled to testify, so she and Sameer were sitting in the courtroom in their place.
She and Sameer had become close to the Dhekane family as a newer member of a club no parent wants to join. Matty too had been denied justice, Debbie Eappen often said. He reduced the charge to involuntary manslaughter and sentenced Woodward to time served.
Yet shortly after Woodward was convicted, the judge rejected the jury’s decision. Their British nanny Louise Woodward was charged with the crime and convicted of second-degree murder. Her 8-month-old son Matthew, nicknamed “Matty,” had been shaken to death in 1997. She could feel Sameer’s deepening misery, a feeling she shared. Sitting next to Sameer on the hard bench, Debbie Eappen glanced over in concern. Rehma, Sameer often said, never had her day in court. It was dismissed when the medical examiner changed her mind about Rehma’s cause of death a reversal that occurred after she read opinions from defense medical experts who questioned or rejected the shaken baby diagnosis. Unlike this trial, Rehma’s case was never heard by a jury.
Like the babysitter in this trial, Rehma’s nanny maintained her innocence. Rehma had been violently abused on her first birthday in 2013, her nanny accused of shaking her so badly the back of her eyes bled and her brain swelled into her spinal cord, hindering her ability to breathe. Despite himself, Sameer began to imagine the images were of his daughter Rehma’s brain, her once-twinkling eyes. Sitting in the courtroom in support of the Dhekane family, Sameer Sabir stiffened with each sharp click of the prosecutors’ slides. All injuries that occurred, prosecutors argued, when she was violently shaken to death in 2014 by her babysitter.
Here was the severe swelling in Ridhima’s brain. In a courtroom, prosecutors were showing the jury sobering images of the damage inside the brain and eyes of 6-month-old Ridhima Dhekane. Stormy gray clouds hovered over a Boston courthouse, mirroring the grim mood inside.
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