NASHVILLE, TENN. (WTVF/Nashville Banner) — The happy birth announcement came a month after the baby's arrival, printed in black and white.
Maze, Russell and Kay, have named their son, born March 25 at Baptist Hospital, Bryan Alexander. No one could have imagined what would happen next. And the grim headline that would later blame his father for little Alex's death. A complicated case, clouded by lots of gray areas, yet jurors decided twice that this was a clear cut: a black and white, undeniable case of shaken baby syndrome.
When baby Alex finally got home to his parents 1999, he already had a lengthy medical history. Born premature, after a difficult pregnancy and induced delivery, he weighed just 3 pounds, 12 ounces. The umbilical cord had tangled around his neck twice. Alex spent 13 days in the intensive care nursery, and a number of odd things happened.
One night, when he was less than a week old, his tiny heart began racing, even as he slept. It was stabilized with ice, but the problem — called tachycardia — would return and require a home monitor. Nurses noted that Alex once gained five ounces over a single 24-hour period. Unusual. And his head seemed to be growing rapidly. Several centimeters difference within just four days.
Russell and Kay Maze were diligent first-time parents. They took a special CPR class for preemies and took the baby to the pediatrician for episodes of coughing and constipation. The medical record shows at least one physician was worried about heart failure. The couple bought a stethoscope, and when he was just 24 days old, they took Alex to an after-hours urgent care, worried about his breathing.
"He had a little bit of a sniffle cold and he didn't sound like he was breathing right to me," Russell Maze said. "So we took him to the ER, where they told us that we were overreacting and that he was fine. So you didn't think he was breathing right? He didn't sound like he was breathing right to me."
During the three weeks Alex was with his parents, they took him to see doctors seven times and got telephone advice at least twice.
On May 3, the 39th day of his life, Alex, at home with his father, stopped breathing. And that was the beginning of a conviction that is now in doubt.
"What I'm trying to say is I have never intentionally shaken my child to a physical, hurtful degree. If I had, if I had shaken my child at all, it was an accident in picking him up. That's not the way it happened," Russell Maze said.
"And that is not the way it happened. People pick up children that way every day. And the injuries that your child has did not come from picking up your child that way. They came from shaking your child."
Over hours of questioning, Russell denied shaking Alex more than 10 times. But detectives kept pressing him. The conventional wisdom at the time was, if you saw a child with a particular set of medical findings, the cause had to be shaking and could not have been anything else.
An exhaustive study by the Davidson County Conviction Review Unit has concluded that Russell and Kay Maze did not commit a crime.
Doctors were overlooking the baby's complicated medical history and many other potential causes, but it's taken 25 years and new scientific understanding to untangle this case. And all along, Russell Maze has been behind bars.
"Our legal system values finality. They want cases to be done. And our scientific infrastructure values novelty, values new discovery. I don't think that it matters how many times a person was convicted. If the science is wrong, it's wrong."
Fostering Hope provides Christmas for kids in foster care. I'm delighted to see Fostering Hope expand this year to expand their reach to now include kids in Foster care in metro AND foster kids in East TN hard hit by Helene.
-Bree Smith
