‘Medical Kidnapping’: Black Texas Parents Whose Baby Was Taken Over Rickets Diagnoses Regain Custody, But Mom Faces Criminal Charges
The trouble started for Quentin and Alandria Seabron during the Mike Tyson-Jake Paul fight last November, when they noticed their daughter’s arm was limp.
Alandria Seabron explained her daughter, Jirah, had trouble latching during breastfeeding and wasn’t gaining weight.
She reached out to an expert who advised her to reduce breastfeeding due to overproduction and use a latching device. Jirah was startled, her mother said, after she had to pull her little girl away from her breast because the milk had overflowed.
After noticing Jirah’s limp arm, the Seabrons said they rushed their daughter to Children’s Health in Dallas, where X-rays revealed a broken arm and 16 internal fractures.
“In my head, I thought that it was probably just a dislocated arm,” Quentin Seabron told CBS-11 in Dallas. “And like any other mother and father, we were surprised at that because how in the world does my child have a broken arm?”
The hospital staff grew suspicious. Child Protective Services was called in to investigate, reports the station. The Seabrons said they had been concerned about their daughter’s low vitamin D levels but were unaware of the internal fractures. Alandria Seabron said she did her own research and believed Jirah was suffering from rickets, a condition that weakens bones, impacting mainly children with darker skin tones and a family history of the disease.
CPS concluded Jirah needed to be removed from the home, though a judge returned the now-8-month-old to the Seabrons in March. But prosecutors continued to make a case against Alandria Seabron, who would eventually be indicted by a grand jury on a charge of injury to a child/elderly/disabled with reckless bodily injury. The indictment alleges the mother caused Jirah’s injury by “aggressively grabbing, twisting, or pulling the arm of an infant child.”
Mansfield police detailed “grabbing and pulling with force sufficient to cause the fracture” in their report.
The Tarrant County District Attorney’s Office declined to comment on the case. Alandria Seabron was arrested and is scheduled to make her first court appearance next month.
She said she and her husband are victims, too, of a “medical kidnapping.” Their lawyer, Shelly Troberman-Miller, said initial lab results showed signs of overlooked bone health issues.
“Just the initial labs were so clearly indicative of a child who had some issue with bone health, that that should not have been ignored,” she said.
CPS has not commented on the case, citing confidentiality issues.
Troberman-Miller, who is representing the couple only in the child custody case, not the criminal one, said the Seabrons’ lack of financial resources has put them in this situation.
“This is as destructive to families as missing abuse in certain cases, right? I mean, if you don’t have a lot of money to defend yourself with highly qualified experts, you aren’t getting your baby back,” the defense attorney said.
Alandria Seabron said she is focused on her daughter’s health.
“It’s not just traumatizing to us. It put her through a lot as well,” the 29-year-old mother said.