4-Month-Old Dies After Mum Tucks Him In Bed With 4-Year-Old Sister

A four-month-old baby, Danny Edge, died as he slept next to his 4-year-old sister after their mum, Yvonne Checkley,  put them to bed together.

Mrs Checkley, 29, usually put him to bed at 10pm every evening and he would sleep soundly through until 8am the next morning. However, tragedy struck at their Manchester home on February 15 when Mrs Checkley’s partner, a CCTV engineer also called Danny Edge, was staying at the house.

Mrs Checkley put Danny down in her own bed along with her daughter and she slept in her other son’s bed. But the next morning at 7.30am, she found Danny unresponsive lying on the bed – and called an ambulance. Danny was taken to Salford Royal Hospital where he was pronounced dead.

In a statement, she said: ‘They were not near each other. She was not near him. He was on top of the quilt. He had his blanket over him.’

Pathologist Dr Melanie Newbould said his cause of death was ‘unascertained,’ and that Danny’s position in the bed next to his sister would not ‘make the death in anyway explicable’.

At an inquest a coroner ruled out neglect, saying: ‘If you have a baby on top of clothes on the bed with another child separate and apart that would not really be of any concern.’

Danny had been healthy, only suffering bacterial conjunctivitis and a cough in his earlier months.

Detective Inspector Joseph Clarke of Greater Manchester Police carried out an investigation into Danny’s death and ruled out any suspicious circumstances.

He said: ‘He was a stunning healthy baby, obviously well looked after. His parents could not have done more for him as well as their other children.’

Recording a verdict of death by natural causes, Coroner Alan Walsh said: ‘Sometimes sadly there are unexplained deaths from natural causes without being able to establish the specific cause…Dr Newbould carried out a full post-mortem together with other tests. At the end she did not find a cause of death and recorded it as unascertained. It is known that babies can die suddenly and unexpectedly as a result of heart arrhythmia and seizure without warning.’

Sad!