When Sarah Goble and her husband Brian Boxx celebrated their son Finnik’s first birthday last weekend at a park near their home in Mission, Kansas, they weren’t just helping him blow out the candle on his funfetti cake. They were looking back on the blown-apart year they spent being accused of child abuse — specifically, of causing a number of “suspected,” “probable” and healing fractures in bones that at the time were the width of two toothpicks.
Some of these, as it turned out, were not fractures at all. And all were asymptomatic, meaning that there’s no evidence they ever caused any pain. According to Finn’s pediatric records, he was healthy and thriving both before and after the regular two-month check-up he had just days before his parents brought him to the ER at Children’s Mercy Hospital on the they-wish-they’d-stayed-home morning of Oct. 2, 2024.
“The fractures were discovered incidentally during a workup for vomiting,” pediatric radiologist Julie Mack wrote in her expert opinion for Finn’s family, which called the abuse finding incorrect. None of these “appear to have produced noticeable symptoms. These findings are consistent with a single minor force event, such as a fall in the arms of a sibling.”…