Share and Follow
A troubling case has emerged from Indiana, where a young father stands accused of grievous actions leading to the tragic death of his newborn son. Oliver Clayton Lee Young, 24, faces serious charges including neglect of a dependent, aggravated battery, and domestic battery, as reported by WPTA. The charges are particularly severe as they are compounded by the fact that the victim was an infant, under the age of 14, and the neglect and battery charges carry the grave implication of resulting in death.
The distressing sequence of events began on October 17, 2025, when authorities were alerted to a dire situation at Parkview Huntington Hospital. A family case manager raised the alarm after the infant was brought in with suspicious injuries that were life-threatening and appeared far from accidental.
Initially, the infant’s mother had taken him for a routine check-up, where a pediatrician noticed a bruise on the boy’s back. When questioned, the mother suggested the bruise might have been caused by the baby rolling onto a pacifier. However, the doctor expressed skepticism, pointing out that a child of just a few weeks is typically not able to roll over unaided.
Concerned for the child’s well-being, the pediatrician directed the parents to take their son to the emergency room. There, medical staff suspected the infant was suffering from a brain bleed. As a result, the baby was urgently transferred to Riley Children’s Hospital in a life-threatening condition. Throughout this ordeal, the parents provided conflicting accounts of how their child sustained his injuries, complicating the investigation.
The doctor sent the baby with his parents to an emergency room, where a doctor suspected the child had a brain bleed. The child was transferred to Riley Children’s Hospital in life-threatening condition while the parents gave inconsistent stories about how the child was injured.
The baby’s grandmother, meanwhile, told investigators she was concerned about a blood spot in the baby’s eye that had been there for more than a week.
An MRI on October 20 confirmed swelling in the brain, but the baby was eventually considered stable enough to be discharged.
The mom called 911 on October 29, however, and reported the baby was unresponsive. Doctors at Parkview Huntington found “virtually no brain activity” with significant head trauma and internal bleeding. A doctor said the injuries were consistent with the baby being shaken.
The infant was airlifted back to Riley Children’s Hospital the following day, WANE reported. Doctors there found a healing fracture in the child’s leg, which they said could be linked to shaking or could also happen if he was pulled by the leg. They further found multiple healing fractured ribs that they say could have happened if the child was squeezed too hard.
The baby was declared brain dead on November 2. The Marion County Coroner’s Office determined the cause of death to be craniocerebral trauma and determined the manner of death to be homicide.
When police spoke with family members at the apartment where Young lived with the mother and the baby, they learned that the baby was heard crying on the morning of October 29 and that Young told the baby to “shut the f*** up” and took the baby to the bathroom multiple times while he was crying.
The child’s grandmother told police that the mother asked for help that morning because the baby wasn’t taking his bottle. She said that when the mom handed her the baby, he was lifeless and struggling to breathe.
Young and the mother told investigators they thought the injuries were caused by hospital staff, although Young also made comments about possibly taking the blame for the baby’s death. He said, however, that if he did kill his son, it was an accident.
When investigators searched Young’s phone, they found he had read an article on Quora about what to expect from a lengthy prison sentence on October 29 and, two days later, one called “How to Cheat a Polygraph Test (Lie Detector): 9 Hacks & Prep Tips.” Police said his search history had been manually deleted.
Young was booked into the Huntington County Jail on Sunday and given a $150,000 bond.