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Paris man gets 20-year sentence
By Bill Hankins
The Paris News
Published November 9, 2007
A 27-year-old Paris man was sentenced to 20 years in prison Thursday for physically abusing his girlfriend’s child.
Anthony Trent Barbour was convicted Wednesday on two counts of injury to a child from the July 2006 incident that sent the near-dead 8-year-old boy to Children’s Medical Center in Dallas by helicopter with a morphine overdose and severe bruising.
Lamar County’s 62nd District Judge Scott McDowell sentenced Barbour to 20 years on one count and 10 years on the other, with the sentences to run concurrently. The jury ruled morphine was a deadly weapon which demands Barbour serve a minimum half of his sentence before parole eligibility.
“We don’t get many jury trials involving a physical abusive beating of a child,” said Lamar County and District Attorney Gary Young. “Most of the time the evidence is circumstantial and there’s not necessarily a smoking gun. This jury used their common sense and listened closely to what we put before them.”
The boy’s mother, Barbour’s live-in girlfriend, testified she was at work as a nurse in Sherman all day and when she returned to their Paris home and made dinner, she found her son unresponsive with blue lips and eyelids.
A nurse testified the victim’s temperature was 87 degrees when he arrived at Paris Regional Medical Center by ambulance.
Paris pediatrician Dr. Ed Clark said the bruising found on various locations on the boy’s body was “clearly abuse” and that morphine was found in his system.
Clark sent the boy to Children’s Medical Center where child abuse trauma expert Dr. Matthew Cox treated him.
Both Clark and Cox said the boy was almost dead.
“Without the excellent work and response time from Paris EMS, the Paris hospital and their nurses, Dr. Clark and then the folks at Children’s Medical Center, this kid would have died,” Young said.
The boy testified at the trial of numerous nighttime beatings from Barbour and said Barbour gave him a bad-tasting liquid medicine in a spoon on the day of the incident. He said he remembered nothing after that before waking up in the hospital.
Paris Police Sgt. Shane Boatwright told the jury he traveled to the Dallas hospital where he interviewed the boy’s mother and Barbour. A Dallas nurse testified each time Barbour would enter the boy’s intensive care unit room, the boy’s blood pressure would go up 20 points and the pulse “would skyrocket.”
Assistant prosecutor Marilee Bown said in her closing argument: “There is no one else that could have hurt this child. All arrows point to Trent Barbour.”
The boy’s mother told the jury she did not believe Barbour abused her child but offered no explanation how the morphine was found in his system and could not explain the bruising other than to say she had spanked the boy recently.
The mother has lost custody of the boy and another child.
Barbour was represented by defense attorney Talmadge Nix of Sherman.
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