Christopher Barber served nearly five years in a Pennsylvania prison in the 1990s for shaking his fussy baby boy and flinging him onto a couch so hard that he suffered catastrophic brain damage.
Now Barber is behind bars again, charged with homicide, following his son’s death at age 23 after he lingered in a vegetative state the rest of his life, hooked to a breathing machine and fed through a tube.
Barber, 46, was arraigned Wednesday and jailed without bail. Prosecutors had him arrested after a pathologist ruled Christopher Kostenbader’s death last May a homicide, saying he succumbed to “complications due to the severe head injury that occurred in 1991 at the hands of the defendant.”
Cases like this one – in which prosecutors file new, more serious charges after the victim takes a turn for the worse much later – are unusual but hardly unprecedented. In November, a Southern California jail inmate who abused a baby girl in 2005 was charged with murder over her death a decade later.
The challenge for prosecutors in such cases is showing that the defendant’s long-ago actions led to the victim’s death.