UPDATE | Kennewick man facing manslaughter charge accused of shaking baby to death
A 41-year-old Kennewick man allegedly shook a 2-month-old infant hard enough to kill her two years ago.
Now, Timothy P. Barnett is facing one count of first-degree manslaughter after a two-year investigation into the death of the baby at a Hood Avenue home.
A U.S. Marshals task force arrested Barnett in Kennewick on Monday evening, police said in a release on Tuesday afternoon. He’s now being held in lieu of $1 million bail.
The arrest came after a forensic pathologist and another medical expert confirmed that bleeding in the baby’s brain was caused by shaking her.
Kennewick police began investigating the baby girl’s death about 6:30 a.m. on Sept. 14, 2021 after they were called to an apartment on the 4300 block of West Hood Avenue, about a child who was unconscious and not breathing normally.
Medical staff tried resuscitating the child for nearly an hour, but weren’t able to save the girl’s life.
Barnett does have a lengthy criminal history with his most recent conviction coming in 2017, according to court records. Most of his history is for drug possession, with one conviction for violating a protection order and two counts for assaulting a child in 2004 and 2006.
Emergency Call
The girl’s mother told investigators she had returned to work as a Pasco School District bus driver that morning for the first time since the child had been born, according to court documents.
When she left the house at 6 a.m., the baby was in the bed with Barnett who was awake. Half an hour later, she said she received a panicked FaceTime call from Barnett who screamed that the baby was having a hard time breathing.
“She told him (Barnett) to call 911, but he said he didn’t want to call,” according to the affidavit of probable cause.
He said the child was like that when he woke up. The child’s mother eventually hung up and called 911 herself.
The woman’s sister said Barnett had changed in the last couple months, and she believed he had started using drugs again. He previously had a problem with heroin, according to court documents.
When firefighters arrived on the scene, they blocked in Barnett, who was trying to leave.
An officer saw him later and said he was “swaying back and forth, had droopy eyelids and provided lethargic responses to questions asked while sweating profusely, despite being dressed in shorts and a T-shirt in 51-degree weather,” according to court documents.
Shaken Baby
Police let Barnett leave the scene and began trying to determine what killed the young child.
An examination by the Snohomish County Medical Examiner Dr. Brian Nagao turned up bleeding in the child’s brain.
“The constellation of subdural hemotomas, retinal hemorrhages and cerebral edema are consistent with non-accidental head trauma, including shaking,” Nagao said in his report according to court documents.
They brought the information to Dr. Alex Levin, who is one of the foremost experts in the United States of how child abuse manifests in the eyes. After reviewing the evidence, he believed with the lack of any other evidence, that the bleeding in the baby’s eyes was a symptom of shaken baby syndrome.
