August 5, 2016
By Paul Joseph, Paragon News Director –
The trial of a Canute man began this morning in Beckham County District Court.
The man is accused of child abuse by injury from an incident in 2014 that may have caused permanent blindness in a three-month old, male child.
Jury selection began yesterday morning at 9:30, but the jurors weren’t seated until yesterday afternoon in the trial of 26-year-old Nicholas Kyle Merz.
Testimony in front of six men and six women along with two alternates began this morning.
According to a probable cause affidavit, investigators believe Merz is responsible for the injuries of the child that were diagnosed as abusive head trauma, or AHT also called shaken baby syndrome.
The court document says that on September 6, 2014, the baby’s mother took the infant to Sayre Memorial Hospital’s Emergency Room after finding the child drenched in sweat and his left side twitching. The infant was then transferred to OU Children’s Hospital where he was found to have bilateral acute subdural hematomas and hemorrhages with a subdural hematoma thought to have been caused three to five days earlier. A doctor at OU diagnosed the baby to have traumatic brain injury.
At the time, Merz was the boyfriend of the mother and had been left with the baby on multiple occasions as a caregiver while the mother was away at work.
The trial is expected to continue Monday and into Tuesday.
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