Baby attacked in Brisbane park laughs for first time in days

For the first time in days, a nine-month-old attacked in a Brisbane park has laughed and smiled, and even given a nurse a high-five.

The boy at Hanlon Park just minutes before the attack.

It’s a remarkable turnaround for the little boy, who on Tuesday was in a park with his mother when an unknown man approached, pouring a Thermos of scalding coffee onto him in what police believe to be a calculated attack.

Photos of the boy taken just minutes earlier show him sitting on a blue picnic blanket, playing with a toy car, as Brisbane’s weather began to heat up.

His mother had taken him to Hanlon Park, at Stones Corner in Brisbane’s south, to meet a friend and her child.

They had never been to the park before.

That morning, the little boy had taken some more steps by himself, much to the delight of his mother.

“I was so happy and excited,” she recalled from the Queensland Children’s Hospital on Saturday morning.

“He’d been sick for two weeks with a virus, so you know, he wasn’t doing too much, so it was nice and I was so excited to go to the park and show him off to my friends and be like, ‘look, he’s walking’.

“Then this happened within five or 10 minutes of me being there, sitting down.”

The boy remains in the Queensland Children’s Hospital.

As the event plays on repeat in the mother’s mind, she wonders if the man had seen her before, and what his motive was.

The man, described as about 30 to 40 years old, poured the hot liquid over the nine-month-old before fleeing.

As the boy’s screams rang out through the park, the mother’s friend chased the attacker, but he managed to escape.

Nearby CCTV showed him running down a street near the park.

It has since been revealed that the man was seen outside a church on Duke and Cornwall streets in Annerley, where he changed his clothes after the attack. It’s believed he then caught a rideshare car to Caxton Street, near Suncorp Stadium.

“I tried to call triple zero, but I was absolutely frantic and screaming and yelling, so I couldn’t actually speak to them, and then a man came up and was like, ‘Do you need me to call emergency services?’

The nine-month-old smiled, laughed and began to play again for the first time on Saturday.

“I said, ‘yes, yes’, and I was trying to tend to my son.”

The mother said by the time they got the boy into a shower at the nearby home of a woman who came to help, paramedics had arrived.

“I was just screaming, yelling, saying, ‘please give him pain relief’ because he was in so much pain, and we had to do the 20 minutes in the shower, the cool water.

“All the emergency services were absolutely amazing.”

A man who may be able to help police investigating the attack in Hanlon Park.Credit: Queensland Police Service

The boy was rushed to the hospital, where his little body has remained almost entirely bandaged for days in between surgery and treatment.

But on Saturday morning, his family saw the first spark of recovery.

Photos show him smiling into the camera while on a hospital bed.

“He’s amazing, I mean, the first couple of days were really awful, but he’s perked up, and he’s back to laughing this morning,” his mother said.

“I haven’t heard him laugh in days.

“He’s smiling. We’re just trying to make it as normal as possible, you know, like giving high-fives, and he’s clapping and giving us all kisses. All the things we were doing before.

“He was very, very wary of people the first few days. He didn’t want anyone touching him other than us, which is understandable.

“Whereas now, he just gave the nurse a high-five before.”

Her son had begun playing again, the mother said, and was due to see his older sister on Saturday.

He will undergo another operation on Tuesday, and doctors have told his mother that the burns on his neck and chest will scar and likely need skin grafts.

“But the other burns, on his face, chin and cheeks, his head, arms and back should heal well,” she said.

“He’s got to have surgeries every three or four days for the next three weeks or so, then after that, it’s like four months at least before the skin starts to change colour ... after that he has to have special creams and sunscreens.

“He’s strong, he’s doing way better than I am ... he’s not letting this stop him from doing anything.”

The mother said she had been operating on adrenaline and had only slept for about one hour since the attack.

“Yesterday it started to wear off, I did not cope at all. I was just crying all day long,” she said.

An online fundraiser for the boy and his family has so far raised about $100,000. Hundreds of members of Brisbane’s community continue to share the attacker’s image in the hopes police will find him.

“Just hand yourself in,” the mother said. “I don’t even know what I would say to him if I saw him other than ask ‘Why? Why us, and what did you achieve?’

“What was the point in this?

“If anyone is hiding this person, take a look at yourself and come forward to the police.”