Anthony Estrada: Teen Dad Arrested After Taking Two-Week-Old Infant Son To Hospital, Says He ‘Lost Control’


Anthony Estrada, a 19-year-old teen father in Tempe, Arizona, has been arrested after bringing his son to the hospital with injuries related to Shaken Baby Syndrome.

Estrada claims that he “lost control” of the two-week-old boy. He also admitted to biting the child’s hand hard enough to bring blood because he was “frustrated while carrying his son, when the child was crying,” according to a report from KPHO.

The couple initially brought the child to Banner Desert Hospital on Memorial Day. At the time, they said their son was “acting weird.”

As doctors got a closer look, however, they believed that the child’s injuries — he suffered serious trauma to each quadrant of the brain and required two blood transfusions — couldn’t have been accidental.

That’s when police were brought in, and under questioning, Anthony Estrada told them that “the baby fell on a couch, rolled and hit a board which was in the frame of a couch.”

The medical report said otherwise.

At this time, it isn’t known if the child will recover, but if he does, he could be facing significant mental health challenges for the rest of his life.

Time will tell. In the meantime, Tempe Police have decided to book Anthony Estrada on charges of child abuse. Those charges could escalate if the child dies.

According to the boy’s mom, she had only left their son with Estrada for “about 20 minutes” while she went to the store to pick up bandages, a separate report from ABC 15 states.

Some commenters took the crime as proof that teens shouldn’t be allowed to have children.

“Stop letting your babies have babies,” wrote Juls Estelle.

Susan Dowling Fox believed this particular offender should be cut off from having further children.

“Part of his sentence should include castration, or, at the very least, vasectomy. And the same for her.”

Teen parents definitely have disadvantages in being able to raise children effectively, considering scientists agree that the brain isn’t really “adult” until around the age of 25.

Still, some found the prescribed methods extreme and believed that there had to be other ways — preferably through education — to keep incidents like this one from occurring.

But what do you think, readers?

Are the vast majority of teen parents doing just fine, or do cases like that of Anthony Estrada make you believe that more constraints should be placed on who’s allowed to reproduce and who isn’t. In essence, how young is too young to have children, or is blaming age too narrow-minded? Sound off in the comments section below.

[Image via Tempe Police c/o KPHO, linked above]

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