Dad who broke seven-week-old baby’s collarbone while he played Xbox in ‘man cave’ sobs as he’s spared jail
A DAD who broke a crying baby’s collarbone while he played X-box in his “mancave” sobbed as he avoided jail.
Kieran Groves attacked the seven-week-old in a “split second of rage” while looking after the girl in Bicester, Oxfordshire.
Her nurse mum, who was making dinner at the time, came running in after hearing a “hard cry”.
The tot was rushed to hospital where medics found she had suffered a fractured collarbone.
Groves sobbed yesterday as he avoided jail after admitting causing grievous bodily harm.
Oxford Crown Court was told he was jailed in 2002 for shaking a child so hard she was left with a brain injury.
Groves was playing his games console in his “mancave” on April 27, 2021, when the horror unfolded.
The baby’s mum had given him the crying child to look after so she could make dinner.
Around ten minutes later, the baby’s cry “changed in nature to a scream and a hard cry”.
Groves claimed he was putting her down in a cot when he heard a “click or crack”.
The baby was rushed to hospital where Groves and the baby’s mum were arrested after the fractured collarbone was found.
The innocent mum told how she was “made to feel like a criminal” with her baby placed in foster care for three weeks.
In a victim impact statement, she added: “I am traumatised and for me it is the ‘what if’ and what could have happened to her.
“Because of him I was arrested and left in a cell and treated like a criminal and my baby was taken off me.
“She was safe when I left her that evening. He should have kept her safe from harm.”
The mum was only released when Groves sent her a text message saying he had hurt the child “out of rage”.
He wrote: “For a split second I lost it.”
Groves was handed a two year sentence suspended for 23 months.
Sentencing, Judge Stuart Trimmer said: “You have been given a rare chance and if you fail, it is almost inevitable that the judge will impose that prison sentence.”