OLATHE, Kan. — Kingston Gilbert was just 4 months old when his future was ripped from him by someone who was supposed to be caring for him.
On Thursday, Paige Hatfield was sentenced to just over 7 years in prison for causing devastating and irreversible brain damage to the baby boy in her unlicensed home daycare.
Kingston’s parents said that’s hardly enough punishment seeing as their son is serving a life sentence.
“Yes, we know we know what happened to him. But this is what it is now, and this is what it is going forward. That`s the reality of it,” Kingston’s dad Paul Gilbert said.
Hatfield shook Kingston so hard that it caused what doctors called “abusive head trauma.” Parts of his brain are dead, and he’s now blind.
The reality is that Kingston isn’t the baby his mom dropped off at daycare in January 2017.
“It’s just hard,” Ashleigh Garcia said. “He was happy and healthy when we dropped him off. There was nothing wrong with our baby, and then we literally, literally like lost that baby.”
The next time Garcia saw her son, Kingston was laying on the floor of Hatfield’s home surrounded by paramedics who were fighting to keep him alive.
“I just always had a vision of having a family and having a son,” Gilbert said.
His wish came true a year after he and Garcia got married when they welcomed Kingston. The four months after their son was born were the happiest time of their lives, which have since been changed forever.
“It’s unlikely that he will ever ride a bike, ever read a book, ever watch a movie, ever go to college, ever a career,” Gilbert said.
Now Kingston’s accomplishments are on a smaller scale but much bigger.
“We never give up hope because literally we were told that he possibly just lay there for the rest of his life,” Garcia said. “He may never sit up; he may never push up in his arms; he may never do anything. And we have seen him do amazing things because he works so hard.”
“It feels good to help see him hit different milestones in his own way,” Gilbert said, “and he does things that are amazing.”
Now, Kingston’s parents will try to get laws changed to protect the vulnerable so another life isn’t ruined with what they believe is just a slap on the wrist for the person who did it.
