Ogden • Krystopher Cleary accepted responsibility for causing the devastating injuries that killed his newborn son when he pleaded guilty to murder in December.
But for 2-week-old Kyson Cleary’s mother and her family, it feels as if Cleary has not truly taken the blame for the boy’s 2015 death. He’s never disclosed what actually happened that December day — how the boy ended up with a swollen brain, tears in his brain tissue, a broken collar bone and injured eyes.
“I hope someday that I can forgive you, Kristopher,” the child’s mother, Madison Wilson, said Monday during Cleary’s sentencing hearing. “But that day is not today or any time soon. … Maybe someday you will actually own up to what you have done.”
On Monday, Wilson and her family were no closer to getting answers. Given the chance to speak before he was sentenced to prison, Cleary offered nothing more than a short apology.
“I apologize for everything that has happened,” the 22-year-old man said. “It has had a big impact on my life, knowing my son is dead.”
Second District Judge Joseph Bean sentenced Cleary to a 15-year-to-life sentence — the only sentence available under the law. A parole board will ultimately decide how much time Cleary spends in prison.
Before handing down the sentence, Bean said that he, too, felt it was “disturbing” that Cleary had not taken full responsibility for his son’s death.
“He was born very innocently and all he wanted was love and tenderness in life,” the judge said, “and he didn’t get that.”
A Primary Children’s Hospital doctor testified in 2016 that Kyson suffered “devastatingly severe” head injuries caused by a caretaker. The child died four days after he was brought to the hospital in the early morning hours of Dec. 16, 2015.
Prosecutors believed Cleary caused the child’s death, because he was the only person with his son when the injuries occured.
Wilson said Monday that she still has flashbacks from that day, of seeing her son blue and lying on the floor. She remembers the fire trucks waiting outside, the EMTs that took him away. And after three days in the hospital, she had to make the choice to take him off of life support.
“I had to make the hardest decision of my life,” she said. “I had to choose what was best. I watched my first child struggle to breathe for hours.”
After the child died, Cleary told investigators that the baby had been crying and he and his wife “had tried everything they could think of” to get him to quit, according to charging documents.
While changing Kyson’s diaper, Cleary said he heard the boy’s clavicle bone “pop” before the child went stiff and stopped breathing. The father had no other explanation for the child’s severe injuries.