Garner father charged after toddler suffers severe injuries

Garner police arrested 44-year-old Kiran Netha Pasunuri on Thursday after a 2-year-old child was hospitalized with severe injuries earlier this month. A judge set a $200,000 secured bond, and Pasunuri was scheduled to appear in court Monday.

Police identified Pasunuri as the child’s father and charged him with two counts of felony intentional child abuse inflicting serious bodily injury and two counts of felony negligent child abuse inflicting serious bodily injury. The Garner Police Department said the investigation began after the child was brought in for medical treatment, and officers worked with medical professionals and the Wake County District Attorney’s Office to determine what happened.

Court records described trauma to the child’s head and back, including a brain bleed, a hemorrhage in one eye and compression fractures along the spine. The records also said life-saving treatment was needed, including removing a piece of the child’s skull. Those injuries place the case squarely within the kind of serious abuse allegations that move quickly from a hospital bed to a criminal investigation.

North Carolina General Statute 14-318.4 says a parent or caregiver who intentionally inflicts serious bodily injury on a child under 16 can be prosecuted as a Class B2 felony. State law defines serious bodily injury as an injury that creates a substantial risk of death, causes coma, permanent disfigurement or leads to prolonged hospitalization. In a case like this, those standards can shape the charges prosecutors file and the evidence they will need to prove.

Wake County’s child-protection system also has a reporting duty built into it. Wake County DSS says suspected child abuse or neglect must be reported, and after regular business hours, weekends and holidays, people are told to call 911 and say they want to make a CPS report. The Wake County District Attorney’s Office serves Judicial District 10, which covers all of Wake County, and SAFEchild Advocacy Center in Raleigh says it serves children from birth through age 17 in open physical-abuse, sexual-abuse or serious-neglect investigations.

The Garner case lands in a county that has seen another recent child-abuse allegation involving a young child. In April, Garner police handled a separate case in which a toddler’s broken arm allegedly went untreated. That earlier case involved different facts and a different suspect, but it underscored how quickly untreated injuries and delayed care can draw scrutiny from police, doctors and child-welfare workers across Wake County.