The parents of a baby taken into care and adopted in Britain have vowed to fight until their “last breath” to be reunited with their child after a court cleared them of abuse.
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It is after Karissa and Richard Carter were found not guilty of causing injury to their child.
Carter, an Afghanistan war veteran, added: “We will fight till our last breath”.
“We took our child to the hospital seeking help and they stole our baby from us”.
Despite the case against them having collapsed, Karrissa and Richard face the very real prospect of never seeing their child again after the Family Court approved its adoption past year.
We’ve put together 15 of the most considered and thought-provoking comments this story has generated since it was published, which you can read in the gallery at the top of this article.
Unfortunately for Cox and Carter, their child’s adoption had been finalized earlier this year, notes the Independent.
In a statement, Surrey County Council said: “Any case like this is really hard and we’re always sensitive to the distress it will cause all involved, but our main concern has to be the welfare of the child”.
The couple were allowed supervised contact with their child until about a year ago. “It’s been a long three years trying to battle this and we’re going to fight to try to get our child back”.
But she feared that with the passage of time, the emotional bond between them might not have remained.
The baby was the couple’s first child and they have not had another. Doctors saw bruising and what they thought were fractures, and Cox and Carter were accused of child cruelty and neglect.
Criminal charges against the couple were only dropped on Wednesday (October 7) when their defence team revealed the cause of the child’s ill-health was in fact a blood disorder, a vitamin D deficiency and infantile rickets.
That led prosecutors to offer no evidence and not guilty verdicts to be entered, according to law firm Garden Court Chambers.
But he warned it could be too late – because any family court will take into account the best interests of the child, which has now spent nearly its entire life with other families.
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The Crown Prosecution Service said the prosecution’s case based on “expert medical evidence which supported the original charges of cruelty”. We had contact but have missed everything our child has done.
