Family divided on life support

March 2, 2009 at 12:00a.m.

CINCINNATI (AP) — The case of a shaken infant on life support in Ohio has left relatives divided and led to the arrest of his father and the resignation of a social worker.

Relatives of 5-month-old Savon Edwards say he can’t recover and is kept alive only by buzzing machines at a Cincinnati hospital.

“If anything, we have to pray for him to stop breathing,” said Jerry Gries, his maternal grandmother. Other relatives share her view, but it’s not their call to make.

Savon’s fate is only in his mother’s hands, and she refuses to take him off the machines.

“He’s all right,” Tammy Gries said last week. “He’s doing better, and I don’t want to talk about it.”

The infant has been at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center since December, when police say Ricky Edwards shook his son so violently that the baby stopped breathing and his skull filled with blood. Edwards, 30, is in jail on $100,000 bond for charges of felonious assault and endangering a child, and he could face more severe charges if the infant dies.

Family members say 35-year-old Tammy Gries suffers from emotional problems and is denying reality by keeping her son on life support.

Her first four children were taken away when she couldn’t care for them, and three now live with Jerry Gries. The fourth was put in foster care and then adopted, a path relatives had urged social workers to follow for Savon.

Relatives also wonder why social workers placed the infant with a great-aunt, in the same home as his father, who had a long criminal record and a domestic violence conviction.

“I think there was such a concern with the mom that the dad was a secondary consideration,” said Brian Gregg, a Job and Family Services spokesman.

Officials from Hamilton County Job and Family Services say the infant should have been monitored more closely. The social worker on the case has resigned. A child welfare investigator was fired, and two managers also may be punished.

A disciplinary hearing concluded they failed to properly oversee the infant’s safety, Gregg said.

Sgt. Bob Liston, a Cincinnati homicide detective who arrested Ricky Edwards last month, says there were no obvious signs that the baby had been neglected.