A nurse on duty mistook Tattika Dunn for someone carrying a suitcase when she entered a clinic to have her son’s routine checkup.
Harvey McGlinn, her three-week-old son, was really hung low and horizontally over her midsection.
Unknowingly, the cotton sling had smothered him to death at some time between her leaving home and stopping by to see a nurse.
What would transpire over the next few seconds would, in Ms. Dunn’s words, “rip my heart into a million pieces” and alter the way that New South Wales provides counsel to expectant parents.
The morning of April 8, 2019, when Ms. Dunn, then 36, attended for a consultation at the Breast Feeding Service Drop-in Center in Killarney Vale on the NSW Central Coast, has been described in horrific detail in a coroner’s report.
Deputy State Coroner Derek Lee cleared the nurses and medical personnel involved in the infant’s death in a report after they failed to recognize that Harvey was wearing a sling right away.
Harvey, Ms. Dunn’s third child and the younger brother of twin boys from a previous relationship, was born at 37 weeks, four days gestation, weighing slightly under 3 kilograms. Since then, his weight has varied.
house call Ms. Dunn took her little boy to his visit in a blue Boba Wrap baby sling since nurses had advised Ms. Dunn to check with nurses throughout his short life.
One of the nurses, RN (Registered Nurse) Kovacs, observed Ms. Dunn arrive “walking briskly” and “wearing a blue, sling-like carrier around her” with a “bulge-like presence” at the bottom of the sling, according to the coroner’s report.
She characterized the sling as being “low down,” horizontal, and placed below Ms. Dunn’s belly button.
According to her, “if she had known or thought there was a baby inside the sling at the time, she would have judged that there was an element of danger connected with the method in which the infant was being carried.”
About 650 meters from the health center, Tattika Dunn had stopped for coffee at the Killarney Vale Bakery, where Harvey in the Boba Wrap was “kicking and making sounds.”
She pats Harvey on the bottom to calm him down before leaving the bakery at 8.52 am, according to bakery CCTV video.
At 9.01am, RN Percy, a second nurse, saw Ms. Dunn arrive at the center’s front desk.
She “did not realize Tattika was wearing a baby carrier and instead believed she was wearing some kind of bag around her neck.”
When a third nurse, RN Mitchell, entered the waiting area to announce the name of infant Harvey, she “at first saw that Tattika did not have a pram with her and believed that she may have been a customer of another allied health service,” according to her testimony.
Tattika “had something on her lap that seemed to be extremely little, and RN Mitchell did not immediately recognize that it was a baby,” RN Mitchell said.
Tattika saw that she was wearing a baby sling and that a baby was inside the sling, resting across Tattika’s torso at the level of her belly button, when she stood up.
And when the nurse said that she had anticipated seeing a pram, Ms. Dunn had said, “I’ve got him in here,” indicating to Harvey in his baby wrap.
Because of his inability to lay properly in a pram—possibly as a consequence of his ‘horror’ birth only three weeks before, when he arrived ‘with in bruises from the forceps,’ as she would later explain—Harvey roamed everywhere in the wrap.
“Every time I placed him down, he immediately screamed.” He seemed to be in anguish. I’d tell the nurses that. He never used his stroller,’ Ms. Dunn would later claim on the Kyle & Jackie O program.
Because the infant was not moving or making any noises at that time, the nurse “presumed that the baby was sleeping.”
Ms. Dunn “talked about her prior domestic experience from a former relationship” in the clinic room and “stated worry about Harvey being uneasy at night, and suffering reflux and vomiting over the preceding several days.”
It “takes up to 15 or 20 minutes” to have the talk. Harvey was requested to be examined by RN Mitchell.
The carrier was unwrapped by Tattika, revealing one of Harvey’s legs. According to the coroner’s report, RN Mitchell “noted that Harvey’s skin seemed to be white, blue, or grey.”
She also saw that Harvey’s chin was curled downward, toward his chest, that his lips and nose were blue, and that there was blood around his nostrils.
RN Mitchell saw that Harvey was either dead or unconscious right away. She originally tried to call Triple Zero, but when she realized it would take too long, she shouted, “Emergency.”
At 9.29 am, a call was also placed to Triple Zero.
Tattika Dunn would later admit that she “dropped to the floor screaming” while the clinic personnel desperately attempted to revive Harvey on the KIIS KFM’s Kyle and Jackie O program.
I was unable to assist him. She sobbed, “I was on the floor just watching my kid attempt to be revived, and it was horrific,” she recalled.
Three separate nurses started doing CPR on Harvey while waiting for paramedics to arrive at 9.36am and an emergency doctor to arrive at 9.59am via a CareFlight chopper deployed from Westmead.
At 10.12am, Baby Harvey was declared dead after failing to regain consciousness.
As Ms. Dunn, her fiancé Bill McGlinn, and her kids Seth and Bailey mourned the loss of Harvey, a GoFundMe page was created for them.
Following Harvey’s passing, Ms. Dunn said on Facebook that her heart still felt “torn in a million pieces” and that the situation was still extremely fresh.
“On the 8th of last month, when I was taking my three-week-old lovely newborn boy Harvey in for a normal checkup, Harvey died away for ‘no known cause,’” the author said.
‘A highly cherished family member who had a mother, a father, and twin brothers who were four years old and who adored him beyond all else, was removed from this world.’
“A community rose up and helped accomplish things I simply couldn’t, these folks are now like family,” the speaker said. “When one of our worst dreams came to play.”
There is no evidence that Ms. Dunn violated her duty of care, despite the fact that she refused to take part in an inquiry that lasted over two days last month.
Five important elements were identified by Deputy Coroner Lee’s investigation as potential reasons of Harvey’s death, and Associate Professor Nick Evans, a senior staff neonatologist, was consulted.
Harvey’s age and weight, his health and growth, the presence of benzodiazepine (an anti-anxiety medication) traces in his blood, his posture in the baby carrier at the time of death, and the suitability of parental warnings on the dangers of baby carriers were the contributing variables.