An American man who beat his two-month-old daughter to death and then blamed her cat has been sentenced to 2 years in prison.

On Jan. 15, the District Court of Blue Earth County in Minnesota sentenced Christopher Henderson, 5, to 2 years in prison after he was convicted of violently killing his 2-month-old daughter (second-degree murder), according to U.S. crime outlet Law & Crime.

According to the complaint, at about 41 p.m. on Sept. 15, 2021, Henderson and his wife took their daughter to a local hospital because "the child was not breathing."

The child's face was severely bruised and his legs and ribs were broken.

Eventually, the child, who was taken to a nearby children's hospital for specialized treatment and underwent emergency brain surgery, was declared brain dead and died less than two months after being hospitalized.

When the police questioned the inspector, she said, "I was fine until I went to work this morning," and "I gave my daughter formula and went to work."

Then, suddenly, around 9 p.m. on the day of the incident, I remembered a text from my husband, Henderson.

"I caught a 23-pound (about 7 kg) cat lying on top of my daughter."

When she got home from work, she immediately checked on her condition, but she was already not breathing.

When police asked her husband, Henderson, for details of the situation, he repeatedly claimed that "the cat hurt his daughter."

However, the specialist said, "The child's injury is trauma, not an accident, and it may not be trauma caused by the cat."



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During a follow-up investigation that eventually followed, Henderson told police that he "may have been a little rough when changing diapers" and that he "held the child face down and slapped him on the back for about five minutes harder than usual."

When asked by police if he had hit his daughter hard enough to break her ribs, he reportedly admitted to the crime, saying, "Yes."

Prosecutors charged Henderson with first-degree assault when they first encountered the case, but changed it to second-degree murder when the child died.

Henderson, who was arrested in October of that year, was sentenced to 5 years in prison and is being held on $1 million (about 2.10 billion won) bail.

When the story became known, the local user was outraged, saying, "The sentence is too light because it is only 15 years," and "Isn't it too obvious a lie that the cat attacked the baby?"

(Photo= Courtesy of Blue Earth County Penitentiary, Blue Earth County Sheriff's Office Facebook)