Prosecutors call for a life sentence for the man who beat a 10-month-old baby to death.

WARNING: This post contains graphic descriptions of physical abuse and may be triggering for some readers. 

It was shortly after 6.30am when Casey Veal was woken up by her five-year-old.

“The doors are open,” he was yelling.

“There was just crap everywhere, like it (the car) had been bombed,” Casey Veal said in court.

She ran to her 10-month-old baby’s room.

Her son was lying in his cot, with a blanket pulled over his face and his teddy bear missing.

Something was terribly amiss.

“When I pulled it (the cover) back I just saw that there was blood everywhere and that his face was swollen and bruised, and he was unresponsive,” Casey Veal told the court.

“He (normally) had three blankets on him because he liked to sleep like that with his teddy bear. But this morning he only had one on him and it was perfectly straight across his face,” she said.

Baby Zayden was also a lot higher in the cot than normal.

“He was right up the other end, straight to the top,” she said.

His baby monitor had been unplugged.

The blood. The blankets.

Her baby had been beaten within inches of his life.

Casey and her partner desperately called an ambulance but nothing paramedics did could save the little boy.

Zayden Veal-Whitting died in hospital.

Yesterday, Crown Prosecutor Michele Williams SC called for his murderer to be given a life sentence.

The man convicted of beating is Hayden Hicks – a drug addict who had broken into the family home to steal what he could to fuel his ice addiction.

Last month, a Supreme Court jury in Victoria found 19-year-old Harley Hicks guilty of entering the family home of Casey Veal at Long Gully in Victoria in the early hours of June 15, 2012, high on the drug ice and deliberately striking 10-month-old Zayden dozens of times with a makeshift baton.

The court heard that Hicks was on an ice-fuelled crime spree.

Crown Prosecutor Michele Williams said, “This murder may be categorised as a callous murder of an innocent and defenceless baby.”

In a victim impact statement read out to court, Casey Veal said that since her son’s death she was a “shadow of my former self.”

She said that it has affected not just her but Zayden’s five-year-old brother.

“We both died that day. Xavier lost not only his brother but his true mother. I see everything through dark cloud filled lenses. I struggle daily with slight changes and am constantly ridden with anxiety.

My nightmares are filled with the aftermath of this event such as my son’s funeral and subsequent viewing and final goodbyes, which was further plagued with heartache over the fact, due to medical procedures, as a part of this process.

I was never able to hold him again. I still, to this second, am unable to actually grieve openly.”

She spoke of how much the crime had changed the little boy.

“To see such an adult growth within Xavier at such a young age is heartbreaking… He has seen and experienced things since this crime that words cannot express. He has cried so many tears over his longing for his return. He just cannot comprehend why this happened to us. I cannot provide the answers he is looking for. His grief has consumed my daily life. I constantly worry about his thoughts and sometimes what he has to express. For his age he has lived through more than most adults, without a loud voice and large vocabulary.”

During the trial, Hick’s defence claimed that he was a drug user, a liar, a burglar and a thief but not a killer.

Justice Stephen Kaye said that it was concerning that Hicks had brought a weapon, a home-made baton made out of copper wire and electrical tape, to the scene.

“You couldn’t argue (against) the proposition that this case falls squarely into the most serious cases of murder,” Justice Kaye said.

Hicks will be sentenced at a later date.