Five-month-old Bryan Bell lived in a home where his parents kept an ear to the baby monitor, played with their son day and night, and called in neighbors to watch him, even if they were only stepping outside for a cigarette or to get the mail, friends said.
The parents “were just crazy about that baby,” an upstairs neighbor in their Chicago Heights apartment building said. “I heard them down there playing with that baby all the time.”
But Bryan’s 22-year-old father was still “getting used to being a dad,” a co-worker said.
Last week, that adjustment ended in failure, authorities said.
Roosevelt Bryan Bell was ordered held on $750,000 bond Friday in the death of his son. The infant was shaken violently when his father became upset with the progress of a New Year’s Day football game on television, according to a report prepared for the court hearing by Mary Woolery, an investigator for the Illinois State Police.
The baby, who died Tuesday at Wyler Children’s Hospital in Chicago, was not crying before he was shaken, police investigators said.
He apparently became the Chicago area’s second child abuse fatality this year simply because Syracuse hadn’t been playing well against Colorado in the Fiesta Bowl, police said.
According to Assistant State’s Atty. John Somerville, the baby was sitting on his father’s lap during the game when Colorado scored a touchdown.
Angered, Bell held the baby out in front of him and shook him violently for 10 seconds, Somerville said, “as the victim’s head whipped back and forth.”
He then put the baby to bed, according to police, and watched the end of the game. He found Bryan with his eyes rolled back in his head 20 minutes later.
The baby suffered detached retinas and hemorrhaging behind both eyes, his brainstem fell into his spinal column and his lungs filled with blood, Illinois State Police said.
The Cook County medical examiner’s office on Friday ruled the death a homicide, the result of multiple injuries and blunt trauma better known as shaken baby syndrome. Following the autopsy, prosecutors upgraded charges against the father to murder from attempted murder.
Bryan’s death is part of the trend of violence against the Chicago area’s youngest and most vulnerable. Last year, 58 children under the age of 15 were killed, 26 of them victims of child abuse. Already this year, three have died violently.
The news of the baby’s death shocked friends and co-workers of Roosevelt Bell, who said the man portrayed in court Friday could not possibly be the adoring father, hard-working laborer and devoted churchgoer they knew.
If Bell shook the baby, they believe, he did not do it with murderous intent.
“I’ve known both (parents) for quite a long time. They both adored the child,” said Pastor Scott Reese of the New Life Baptist Church in Chicago Heights, where Bell and his wife, Joyce, 31, regularly attend Sunday services.
The Roosevelt Bell he knows, Reese said, is the one who was thrilled to be a father, who talked about his plans for the baby and playing football with him one day. He is the man who spent Christmas handing out 500 toys to poor children in Chicago Heights and Ford Heights. And he is the man who did not have a problem with drugs or alcohol and who never showed a sign of temper.
“He seemed to handle the child real well. I really can’t picture anything happening with intent,” Reese said. Bell and his wife were heartbroken over the death, he said.
According to Michelle Toscas, a spokeswoman for St. James Hospital in Chicago Heights, Bryan’s parents rushed him to the hospital just before midnight New Year’s Day, after Roosevelt Bell had called his wife home from her waitressing job.
The child, though he bore no marks of abuse, was having difficulty breathing, Toscas said. Unable to stabilize his condition, doctors put him on a respirator and called for a helicopter to take him to Wyler.
They also called the Department of Children and Family Services.
Toscas said, “DCFS was notified there was a suspected abuse case, that the parents had allegedly shaken him.”
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The baby arrived at Wyler at 6:40 a.m. the following day and was kept alive on a respirator until 7:15 p.m. Tuesday, when he was pronounced dead.
During the five-day vigil at the hospital, the boy’s parents never left his side, their pastor said.
Bryan was one of several children to die in the Chicago area recently after being shaken violently. The shaking, doctors say, compresses the brain, which is suspended in fluid, against the skull, causing bruises and bleeding. Blood vessels to the brain also can snap, or the shaking can cause damage to the eyes and spinal cord.
Shaken children, if they survive, may become blind or suffer brain damage, though they show no external injuries.
The problem, doctors said, is that many parents, unaware of the dangers, still shake their children in play or to discipline them. In the process, they often unintentionally do irreversible harm.
In court Friday, Roosevelt Bell, a strapping, handsome man dressed in red sweat pants and a purple jacket, showed no sign of emotion as prosecutors related the events leading to the death of his child. After bond was set, family members and friends in the gallery fled from reporters, refusing to comment except to angrily defend Bell as a good person.
Joyce Bell did not attend the bond hearing.
Friends and neighbors of the Bells have called Bryan’s death a particular tragedy for his mother, who lost another child by a previous marriage to sudden infant death syndrome. Joyce Bell also has an 11-year-old daughter by that marriage, and the girl lives with her father.
When Bryan was born, neighbors said, Joyce hooked up a monitoring device to Bryan’s crib to ensure she could hear every sound he made, no matter where she was in the family’s one-bedroom apartment.
She posted handmade no smoking signs on the doors of the home and stepped outside before smoking her cigarettes-but not before asking a neighbor to keep an eye on the baby, even if it was just for a minute.
And she scheduled her shifts as a waitress at the local Ponderosa-where managers described her as their best day waitress-around her husband’s 3-to-11 p.m. job to ensure that one of them would always be home with the child.
“She was overly protective of the baby,” said Judy Smith, an upstairs neighbor. “She was very attached to this baby because the other one died of SIDS.”
Roosevelt Bell was equally adoring of his son, said Smith, who would often hear the father comforting the baby when the child awoke and cried at night.
“I know he loved that baby because he was down there all the time saying (to the baby), `Daddy, Daddy, Daddy,’ ” apparently in an effort to encourage the baby to say his name, she said.
“I heard the baby cry at night, but I never heard them get angry with the baby, ever,” she continued.
Co-workers of Roosevelt Bell at Gooch’s spaghetti factory in Steger described him as a fun-loving, hard-working general laborer who was quick to offer rides to stranded co-workers and who talked mostly about his church and his baby.
“He was a joy to be around,” said Orlando Jenkins of Park Forest, another plant worker. “He was happy-go-lucky, always cracking jokes.”
Jenkins, who has a 16-month-old child, said he and Bell, a former football player at Bloom Trail High School, often exchanged information about their children.
“He was just learning to be a dad,” Jenkins said.