A BABY who collapsed and died from brain injuries appeared happy and healthy just five or six hours earlier, a murder trial jury has heard.

Just before Charlie Hunt was handed over to his alleged killer, Darren Newton, he was looked after by a babysitter at his Earby home.

Manchester Crown Court was told by the babysitter that when Newton, 32, the partner of Charlie’s mother Laura Chapman, arrived home from work 15-month-old Charlie appeared to become anxious.

The babysitter, who cannot be named for legal reasons, said: “As I was going to leave he didn’t really want me to go and clinged on to me.

“It was as if he was saying ‘don’t go’. I didn’t think anything of it at the time.”

Charlie collapsed in Newton’s care on November 19 last year and later died in hospital.

Newton has admitted 12 charges of child cruelty, captured on mobile phone video clips which show him hitting Charlie around the head on a number of different occasions.

Prosecutors allege Newton is responsible for causing brain swelling which ultimately resulted in the baby’s death at Airedale hospital, near Skipton.

Newton, of Warwick Drive, Earby, denies murder and two other cruelty offences.

The court heard that Charlie had been admitted to Airedale hospital in September 2009 after suffering two seizures.

He went on to have another but appeared to make a full recovery.

Andrew Thomas QC defending said the degree of force needed to cause brain swelling to Charlie may have been considerably less than that of another child because of his previous neurological difficulties.

But Dr Richard Newton, a consultant paediatric neurologist, said that the degree of force needed to produce such brain swelling would have remained the same.

Earlier the court heard that the mobile phone records of Charlie’s mother Laura Chapman had been analysed by police.

The jury was told that at the times Newton was filming himself abusing Charlie, the mother appeared to be in West Yorkshire where her two other children live.

The trial continues.

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