In the video, the Irmo home has a deep orange glow to it and baby Brooks can’t stop giggling. He is perched atop his father, Tim Martin, who lies on his back on a brown couch in the living room.

“Boomer,” Tim calls to the family’s golden retriever mix. Boomer barks. Brooks erupts into laughter, squealing and ecstatically stretching out his tiny fingers.

Boomer barks again. Tim watches his son’s round face open into a wide grin. Brooks reaches out to touch Boomer every time the dog gets close. Tim laughs, too, as he holds his firstborn son up by his waist.

Tim doesn’t know this moment is coated in amber. This is a time capsule.

He gazes up at his “little man.” There’s that soft face with the ocean eyes, hair white-blond like threads of light. Tim loves his son’s elfin ears, how they point out in diagonals. The perpetually drooling smile over the bib that says “Mommy loves me.” This is Tim and Amy Martin’s miracle baby.

They have no idea what they will lose.

What follows is a story of a child’s death, unresolved.

Seven months after this moment on the couch, Brooks would die of brain injuries.

It is possible the boy’s death was a terrible mishap. “It was just a tragic accident,” said John O’Leary, a lawyer who was involved in the case.

It is possible Brooks was killed.

Ten years later, those questions still haunt the families and investigators involved.

But right now, in the glowing living room, Brooks is here. He is 15 months old, finally catching up to the other children his age. It took him a while because Brooks was born too early.

When doctors pulled him out of Amy Martin’s body in January 2009 — at just 29 weeks, about seven months, into Amy’s pregnancy — he weighed 2 pounds, 8 ounces.

His lungs were underdeveloped. Amy’s life was in danger, too. Preeclampsia, a complication that can lead to dangerously high blood pressure and swollen limbs, could’ve killed her with a stroke or seizure if doctors hadn’t performed an emergency C-section.

Brooks was so tiny he could wear his father’s wedding band around his upper arm and shoulder, like a sleeve.

“We literally had the baby shower and she had already had him, but the baby was at the hospital,” said Alissa Duke, Amy’s close friend.

Brooks spent two months in the hospital, during which he progressed and grew stronger. The family left the hospital hopeful, with a couple of machines in tow to monitor Brooks’ heart and to help the 5-pound baby breathe.

Breath became laughter. He was the boy who danced to the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse theme music and said, “Mm, chicken,” when his Chick-fil-A nuggets arrived at the table. He rode Boomer as if the dog were a horse. He drooled through three bibs a day. He sat on the couch and watched entire Gamecocks baseball games with Tim, a diehard USC fan who worked for years at Colonial Life Arena.

Brooks was getting healthier every day, but Amy didn’t like the idea of putting her son in a traditional day care setting, where there would be many other, bigger children. Amy wanted someone who had worked with premature babies before and could give Brooks specialized attention. She wanted someone who would be comfortable with Brooks’ heart monitor. She searched a database maintained by the South Carolina Department of Social Services and found the one: a well-regarded babysitter operating an in-home day care in the neighborhood next door.

“I just didn’t want to put him in a day care,” Amy said. “It was my first child, you know? So I sat with her and talked to her. I felt comfortable.”

Judy Creech was known for being warm and loving to the handful of children she watched. When they arrived in the morning, bowls of grits awaited them. There was a whole room to play in. There was nap time and walks around the park or some other excursion. There were a few other babies and children to have fun with, including the children of a nurse in Amy’s OB-GYN office. It’s where Brooks spent most of his days from the time he was 5 months old.

The morning of Nov. 5, 2010, was no different, except in hindsight. Brooks drank his milk on the couch at home and watched cartoons as Amy got ready for work.

Brooks wore jeans and a T-shirt with an illustration of a football on it. Tim said goodbye to his boy. Amy drove Brooks down the road to the day care.

She carried him up the steps into the Creeches’ home, and put his diaper bag over the baby gate at the mouth of the stairs, as usual. She spoke to Judy briefly and kissed Brooks goodbye.

DESCENT

On the exterior, the Creech house blended in with the suburban Irmo area neighborhood. Nothing distinguished the house from the other well-maintained homes with green lawns and shade trees.

That morning, Judy Creech would say later, she told her husband that she was leaving to take one of their three daughters to a doctor’s appointment. She asked him to listen in on Brooks and another toddler in the house that morning. Michael Creech had stepped in to help before. He was listed as a secondary caregiver on the day care’s registration papers with the Department of Social Services, and Judy occasionally asked her husband to watch the children for short periods of time.

Once before, Amy remembered Michael had been watching the World Cup on television while Brooks sat ready to go home in his baby carrier. That was the only time the Martins knew Michael was watching their son.

On Nov. 5, Michael Creech laid in bed, awaiting a shift at the restaurant where he worked. The Creeches would later tell investigators that the other child in their care was napping in one room while Brooks watched a Dora the Explorer cartoon from his playpen in another.

Judy went down the set of about 15 stairs that connected the upper and lower levels of their home, and left with their youngest child shortly after 10 a.m.

At 10:39 a.m., an ambulance’s sirens broke the late morning quiet of the suburban neighborhood. The house that was no different than the others suddenly stood out. The ambulance stopped in front of the Creech house. Red light cascaded against the home’s yellow siding.

Hysterical, Mike rushed out of the front door and toward paramedics, carrying Brooks’ limp and groaning body in his arms.

A few hours later, in a waiting room on the 10th floor of what was then Palmetto Health Children’s Hospital (now Prisma Health Children’s Hospital), Tim Martin stood by his wife and his father. Other family and friends were with them. So were Judy and Michael Creech.

Tim, gathering all his composure for the sake of his wife, told everyone about Brooks’ condition. Brooks had trouble breathing as medical staff wheeled him into the trauma bay. He showed signs of a severe brain injury that required emergency surgery. Doctors had to open part of his skull to relieve pressure on the boy’s swelling brain.

Brooks’ heart had stopped during the surgery, prompting doctors to end the procedure to try to stabilize him. For the second time in his young life, Brooks lay in the pediatric intensive care unit, with a ventilator keeping him alive.

Michael had told EMTs he found the boy at the base of the staircase after Brooks climbed out of his playpen, walked out of the room he was in and fell down the stairs.

Though he was surrounded by people at the hospital, Michael was alone with his thoughts, people said, numb to consolation and absent from the present. As Tim spoke to the group about his son, Michael picked up a hospital Bible and walked away.

He sat isolated with the Bible much of the remaining day, away from Brooks’ family. That’s how he was — quiet, “head down, not looking at anyone” — when Tim’s daughter, Briana, met him.

Roommates drove Briana an hour to Columbia from the University of South Carolina at Aiken, where she was at school.

That night, Briana’s best friend, Joy, drove to the hospital to be with her. They sat in the waiting room as two police officers walked in for something “totally unrelated” to Brooks, Briana said.

Michael “yelled out, ‘Go ahead and take me now!’ or something like that,” she remembered.

“Joy and I were like, ‘Whoa, he’s really grieving. He’s really hurt,’” she said.

As the hours passed, Michael shifted from despondence to outbursts, Briana said. She felt bad that he was taking the blame for Brooks’ fall, so she walked over to comfort him. Michael wouldn’t look at her or speak to her, she remembered.

“No response, no eye contact, no nothing,” she said. “And I looked at my mom and was like, ‘Huh, that was weird, but people grieve differently.’”

A few hours later, Tim and Amy waited in a small private office in the hospital for Brooks’ attending physician, Dr. Robert Hubbird.

It was “one of those rooms they take you in to give you the bad news,” Amy said.

Dr. Hubbird told the Martins that they would have to wait until the next morning to see if anything could be done to save their son.

Brooks had suffered a traumatic head injury so severe that pooled blood inside his skull had shifted his brain over more to one side. Scans appeared to show “old injuries” in his brain, reports said. He also had “diffuse retinal hemorrhaging” in all three layers of his retinas — too many bleeds in the back of his eyes to count.

What the medical staff knew but the Martins didn’t was that retinal hemorrhages are a red flag in the world of pediatrics. Some studies have determined that unless a child has a bleeding disorder, which Brooks didn’t, severe retinal bleeds are often injuries caused by sharp back-and-forth movement, such as violent shaking or high-speed car crashes.

The medical staff also noted what they didn’t find: any major bruising below his head, minor fractures or broken bones, which are common when children fall. One doctor told authorities a possible explanation for the absence of those injuries is that the stairs were carpeted.

“You just learn that if a kid falls down the stairs, they’re gonna try to brace themselves, they’re going to cry, they’re going to hit themselves,” said Shannon Gooding, an ICU nurse who cared for Brooks and had known Amy since high school.

Because of these concerns, hospital staff had called in the Lexington County Sheriff’s Department. Deputies and a detective were on their way to the hospital. The South Carolina Law Enforcement Division would soon have it on its radar, too.

Dr. Hubbird asked Tim and Amy in the small room if they knew how Brooks could have received the older trauma to his brain and eyes.

Tim said he’d taken Brooks on a roller coaster at the South Carolina State Fair a couple of weeks before. And on Halloween, Brooks had climbed out of his crib and fallen, knocking the wind out of him while Amy was in the shower, she remembered. He’d also tripped and hit his head on the ground at the park recently. And a few days before, Judy Creech told the Martins that Brooks fell and scraped his head on the fireplace while at day care, Amy told the doctor.

Brooks was a toddler. He fell all the time. Could any of those falls have been to blame?

None of that was enough to cause the severe injuries that showed up in the brain scans or the retinal hemorrhages, Hubbird told the Martins.

A thought seized Amy — one that felt like a second wound.

“Are you saying we did something to our child?” she asked Hubbird.

He wasn’t implying that the Martins hurt Brooks, he said.

Clouds of suspicion began to rumble in the parents’ minds. Amy tried to push them away.

“There’s got to be more of an explanation. There’s got to be more to this,” she told herself.

But for Tim, the story that Brooks got hurt by accident began to crumble.

NAT

The next morning moved fast.

Doctors made it clear: The son Tim and Amy loved was gone from his body. If by the slimmest chance Brooks did regain consciousness, he would not be the same child. His brain was irreparably damaged.

Brooks wasn’t going to make it and the Martins had a decision to make. Would they keep him on life support or let him go?

“My son was a child that was full of life,” Tim said. “To keep him alive on a ventilator was not the life that we wanted for him. It’s nothing that we would have chosen.”

The parents signed a do-not-resuscitate order in case the shell of their son crashed again.

They decided to take him off the ventilator the next day, after a final brain exam.

Michael Creech was with his mother and God on Saturday.

He confined himself to the chapel of the children’s hospital most of the day, his mother by his side, comforting him.

In the few words Michael did speak on Saturday, he told Tim he was sorry.

The two men hugged and Michael buried his face in Tim’s chest.

Tim was leery during the embrace.

“‘This is all my fault’” and “‘Brooks wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for me,’” Michael had said in the waiting area, according to police reports. Another person recalled Michael saying that police should take him to jail, a report said.

Amy needed to witness compassion to calm her growing fear that someone intentionally harmed her child. Tim wanted to see how Michael would react holding their child’s hand.

Tim and Amy asked Michael if he wanted to say goodbye to Brooks. He was reluctant but his wife insisted.

In the intensive care room, an IV needle stuck into Brooks’ thin hand. Bandages that quickly became blood-soaked covered his head.

Tim took his son’s small hand and held it.

The chirp of the child’s heart monitor accented the mechanical inhaling and exhaling of his ventilator.

Tim asked Michael if he would hold Brooks’ hand.

Michael held the child’s hand for a moment, let go and left the room.

Gooding, the nurse, walked out of the room, too. She watched Tim hold up Michael, who was sobbing so hard he couldn’t stand by himself. She felt suddenly nauseated.

“I have never in all of my years seen a father who is clearly losing his son comfort someone else like this, much less the babysitter’s husband,” Gooding said.

As Briana said goodbye to Brooks, the sibling she always wanted, she watched a tear roll down his cheek. She didn’t know where the tear came from — her brother was brain-dead — but it made her feel like Brooks knew he was leaving, too.

Briana left the hospital that night, full of sadness and confusion, and got Brooks’ name tattooed in a curly script on her wrist at a parlor in Lexington.

Brooks’ parents remained to take in a final moment with their son before he’d be taken off life support the next morning.

Gooding, the nurse, left the hospital late, after dark, accompanied by the Martins. Amy knew she could trust her old friend to be honest, so she asked: Did she think Brooks fell down the stairs?

No, Gooding said.

“I think deep down she knew. She just needed to hear somebody say it,” Gooding said.

Hubbird, the doctor, had already put in writing what was unspoken.

In Brooks’ medical chart, he had written down three letters — “NAT.”

Non-accidental trauma.

Click here for Chapter 2 of Losing Brooks.

This story was originally published October 22, 2020 at 5:00 AM.

David Travis Bland

The State

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David Travis Bland is The State’s editorial editor. In his prior position as a reporter, he was named the 2020 South Carolina Journalist of the Year by the SC Press Association. He graduated from the University of South Carolina in 2010. Support my work with a digital subscription