THE WEST Cumbrian father accused of murdering his baby son has told a jury that he accepts causing the injuries which led to the child’s death.

Reece Martin Kelly, 31, made the admission as he testified on day six of the trial at Carlisle Crown Court, where he last week admitted the manslaughter of his four-month-old son Dallas but he denies murder.

The defendant accepts shaking his son in an attempt to “rouse him” but says he did this only “gently” and with no intention to cause harm.

Dallas suffered a "traumatic" and ultimately fatal head injury as well as multiple rib fractures.

Kelly and the baby’s mother, Georgia Wright deny cruelty to Dallas, while she also denies “causing or allowing” her son’s death.

For more than three hours, defence KC Eloise Marshall questioned Kelly about his life in the weeks before the tragedy and events on October 15, 2021, when he made a 999 call to report Dallas was not breathing.

The barrister said to Kelly: “It’s right that you accept shaking Dallas on October 15?”

He replied: “Yes.”

The KC said: “You accept causing the injuries that led to his death?”

Again, Kelly accepted this.

The defendant, formerly of Hunday Court, Workington, accepted lying about what happened. Ms Marshall also asked Kelly about his use of street-bought prescription drugs that he was addicted at the time when his son suffered the fatal injury.

He said was 12 or 13 when he first took drugs and that, after taking cannabis for the first time when he was 13, he continued using the drug.

He also took the drugs tramadol and pregabalin.

Ms Marshall quizzed Kelly about stomach pain he suffers from, which he said began when he was 13 and discovered he had ulcers. He described his management of the pain as “very bad”, saying the pain could be “unbearable.”

“Did you ever leave drugs where the children could get them?” asked Ms Marshall. Kelly said: “No. I kept them in a zip bag; I kept them out of reach.”

Kelly spoke of looking after his son when Wright was at work on a burger van.

They would watch movies and cover the living room floor with blankets and make dens, using a play pen tipped on its side.

Ms Marshall asked Kelly: “Honestly speaking, were you a good father?”

“I could have been better,” said the defendant.

Asked what stopped him being a better parent, he said: “My drug habit.” He said he got his drugs from street suppliers.

He also confirmed that Wright had not reacted well when she discovered he had sent flirtatious messages to a woman who had sold them a cat.

There was an incident when she screamed at him and he grabbed her arms, pushing her away, he said. By the following day, said Ms Marshall, they had made up and Wright messaged him to say she loved him and did not want to lose him.

“You are my rock, my world,” she wrote.

In one of her messages to Kelly, she apologised for “how many tablets” she was taking, saying she had been trying to block things out.

Kelly said this was a reference to a mixture of things, including that she had lost her father just before Dallas was born.

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The barrister then asked Kelly about the day his son was rushed to hospital. He said he had taken tramadol and pregabalin and his stomach was “bad.”

After Dallas woke, he took him downstairs and put him in his bouncy chair. He tried to give him his bottle of milk but he did not take it that well, said Kelly. He said he was in pain with his stomach, though it was “not as bad as normal.”

Dallas fell asleep in living room, so he put him back in his room upstairs to nap.

He went to make a coffee but the pain in his stomach was getting worse, he said. “I went to the living room and tried to deal with it but I couldn’t; it’s unbearable. It causes pain; I try to learn to deal with it but there’s only so much a person can take.”

At the bottom of the stairs, he pressed his back against the wall to ease the pain, and then heard Dallas crying upstairs and so went up to see what was wrong. “He’d been sick,” Kelly said. He used toilet tissue to wipe it up, he said.

He said: “He kept crying and I kept trying to settle him. I picked him up and rocked him, tried his dummy; kept trying to settle him. He wouldn’t settle down.”

“He started screaming, not just crying,” said Kelly. “I tried to persist, tried to settle him down but he wouldn’t settle down. I then shook him.”

Ms Marshall asked: “How long did you shake him for?” Kelly replied: “A few seconds, not long.” He said his son tensed up and then “went limp” so he tried shaking him “gently” but he could not rouse the baby.

When he failed to rouse his son, he ran down the stairs and called for an ambulance. He accepted not telling the paramedics what had happened.

The barrister asked Kelly if he knew his son had died because of being shaken.

“I knew he was in that situation because of what I’d just done,” he replied. Describing what was going through his head, he told the court: “I was crying; I was upset. I just wanted to know how Dallas was; I wanted to know he was okay.

“It all happened too fast.”

When the police arrived, he had said it was all his fault and asked how he could tell Wright, Dallas’s mother, what had happened.Times and Star: Georgia Wright

Ms Marshall said: “You lied, day after day, didn’t you? Why was that?”

Kelly said: “I could not face the truth. I could not face the fact that my actions had caused my little boy to be not here now.”

Kelly said that when he was not initially arrested, he began to slowly convince himself that what happened might not have been his fault. Ms Marshall continued: “Tell us why it is that you eventually accepted what you did?”

“Because everyone involved deserves to know the truth,” Kelly replied.

He added that he had no explanation for why Dallas had sustained a rib fracture three weeks before his death on October 19, 2021.

The trial continues.