After a 3-year-long wait, a Birmingham court finally served justice to the family of a 21-month-old baby girl who was brutally killed by her babysitter.
The Birmingham Crown Court on Wednesday found the babysitter, 32-year-old Sean Sadler, of Northfield, England, guilty of murdering Lilly Hanrahan.
The toddler died on Nov. 22, 2017, due to a catastrophic brain injury, according to medical records. She was three months away from celebrating her second birthday when she was killed.
Lilly was discharged into the care of her grandmother because her mother was a heroin addict.
The baby girl was just 5-months-old when another woman was appointed as her special guardian. Lilly then began living in the woman’s house.
Lilly had developed a strong bond with the woman who anyone "would have thought was her actual mother".
She was doing extremely well until her guardian began a relationship with Saddler in Spring 2017.
Saddler gradually became a regular visitor to the house. The woman then began to leave Lilly in Sadler’s care. This gave way to pernicious consequences.
On November 19, 2017, Lilly was found unresponsive at the home and was rushed to Birmingham Children’s Hospital. She succumbed to her injuries three days later.
Days before the fatal attack, the woman had alerted Lilly’s nursery to closely monitor the child after she began noticing bruises on the baby girl’s body.
Prosecutor Jonas Hankin told the court that Lilly had been been a "normal, healthy girl" and that "she had no recent significant illness or accident.”
"The head injury that caused her death was between the times she was last seen to be well and when she lost consciousness," the prosecutor said.
"It occurred when she was in the care of Sean Sadler."
Lilly’s tiny body suffered a series of injuries, including half-a-dozen broken ribs and bruises at places where she had been gripped by Sadler.
"The prosecution contends that Sean Sadler caused the death of Lilly by assaulting her and he is responsible for her murder," the court heard.
"The likely mechanism was forceful shaking, possibly involving an impact on a yielding surface such as the armrest of a sofa."
An autopsy revealed that Lilly had three broken vertebrae in her spine and bleeding in her lungs which she suffered about three weeks before her death.
"Sadler also caused her older injuries, the fractures to the vertebrae and bleeding in the lungs," the prosecutor said.
Ending a three-year wait for justice, Sadler was found guilty of murder and wounding with intent following the trial.
Lilly’s grandmother, 70-year-old, Lesley Hanrahan, described Sadler as a bully and hoped that he would serve a long time in prison.
"I hope he really gets a long time because he picked on the smallest and the innocent and if you think of a bully that’s what he is. He is a big bully - that’s it," the devastated grandmother told Birmingham Live.
"I have no feelings towards him. He’s irrelevant to me. I don’t know him, don’t want to know him. I don’t care."
She recalled the moments she had with Lilly and described her as a "happy, little girl who loved to dance."
"Lilly was funny, she’d hear music and she was off. She just loved music, she loved dancing," Lesley said.
"She used to walk around in these big boots and then if you picked your phone up she’d run straight over and start pulling faces."
"She used to love that and then you show her what you recorded and she loved that."
"She was a really good kid. She can’t say much but she would get her point across," the grandmother recalled.
Lesley said that Lilly’s untimely and brutal death had pulled the family apart and left her struggling.
"You carry on but you know how people say it never leaves you, it doesn’t.
"You get up in the morning, you’re thinking of her when you go to bed at night, you are thinking of her all the time," Lesley said.
Following the guilty verdict, Det Con Jo Buchanan, the family’s liaison officer in the case said it had been a "very difficult" one.
"When you have worked so hard and waited so long, you just feel like you have got justice for Lilly," she said.
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