A MOTHER whose baby son died from a “traumatic head injury” that was caused by the father said she now regards him as a “monster.”

Georgia Wright, 23, at times in tears, voiced her opinion as a prosecutor at Carlisle Crown Court began cross-examining her, just days after Reece Kelly admitted the manslaughter of their four-month-old son Dallas.

Last week, Kelly, 31, accepted injuring Dallas by shaking him "gently" on October 15, 2021, at the couple's Workington home. But he denies murder, saying he had no intention to cause harm.

Under questioning from her defence barrister David Mason KC, Wright said the first she knew of Reece Kelly accepting his actions caused their son’s death was when it was revealed in court last week.

She  denies “allowing or causing” the death of Dallas, while both defendants deny child cruelty.

Wright gave her account of events leading up to October 15, 2021, when Dallas was rushed to hospital from the family’s  Workington home because he stopped breathing.

On that day, she said, she had taken a taxi to the burgher van where she works and she had no concerns about leaving Dallas with Kelly. A phone call came through from Reece Kelly but she couldn’t take it because she was serving a customer.

He then called her co-worker, Kelly’s mum, who passed the phone to her. “He told me over the phone," she said. "All I can remember hearing is ‘He’s not breathing.’ Reece told me on the phone that Dallas wasn’t breathing.

“He’d called an ambulance.”

She arrived at the house a short time later to find the police there but Dallas had been taken to Whitehaven’s West Cumberland Hospital. She was taken there by the police.

She said: “I got to the hospital and there were quite a few people working on him. Nobody told me anything. I didn’t know whether he was going to make it.

“There was a police officer  who came and comforted me, tried to keep me calm because I tried to get to Dallas.”

She was unable to do that because there so many people round “this tiny baby”, she said.

Wright said she was told that Kelly had saved Dallas’s life by giving him CPR after he stopped breathing.

She recounted what she said Kelly had told her: that he had heard their son make a noise he had never before made, ran up the stairs, grabbed some toilet roll, and found Dallas choking.

Kelly said their son had “flopped” and he gave him a “gentle shake” to bring him round and then another “gentle shake” on the bed before beginning CPR.

Mr Mason asked: “Did you have any reason to doubt what Reece Kelly was telling you?” Wright replied: “No.” The barrister then asked her how she had felt when Dallas passed away on October 19.

“Distraught,” she replied.

After the baby died, she had stayed with him before going to the hospital’s chapel of rest, she said. When she was charged with the two offences, how did she feel, asked Mr Mason.

“Confused - it didn’t make sense,” she replied.

“When Reece was charged with the murder of Dallas, how did that make you feel?” said the barrister, prompting Wright to say: “I was confused about that because I believed him; I believed he would never hurt his [son].

“I thought I could trust him and believed every word he told me – but I couldn't.”

Mr Mason then asked Wright how hearing Kelly’s admission – that he accepted being responsible for the death of their little boy, considering what he had been telling her in the two years up to this point?

Wright said: “I can’t describe it. The pains that I felt – they’re unbearable.

“I feel like you can’t trust… I could not believe that he had spent all that time holding me, promising me that he would never hurt our  baby… saying that they’d find out what really happened, and then that we’d  find someone who had answers.”

Earlier in his questioning, Mr Mason took Wright through events surrounding her attempts to get treatment for Dallas’s “extreme reflux.” She spoke of being worried about Dallas’s health.

She said he slept all the time and could not keep his food down and he was losing weight. Wright said she became so worried that she took Dallas to A&E, describing what she did in a phone message.

She wrote: “I just walked right into the hospital because no one was helping me with him.  He needed looked at.”

In other messages, after Dallas was rushed to hospital, she wrote of her fears for the child, saying: “I never felt pain like this. He is only four months old. He’s just at the start of his little life.

“I’d swap places with him in seconds.” She also wrote that at the time she had believed Kelly when he told her that Dallas’s collapse was not the result of “shaken baby syndrome.”

As he began his cross-examination of Wright, prosecutor Richard Littler KC, referring to the manslaughter admission made by Kelly as the trial got underway, asked her: “What do you think about Mr Kelly now?”

She replied: “A monster.”

The prosecution case is that Kelly, formerly of Hunday Court, Workington, shook his son “violently”, intending to cause him serious harm and causing his son multiple brain bleeds and bleeding in the spine and eyes.

Both defendants are also said to have exposed their son to illegal drugs in their home, though Kelly and Wright said they used street-bought tramadol and pregabalin to control pain.

The trial continues.