Horror is unending for slain Bendigo baby Zayden’s mum Casey Veal

WHENEVER Casey Veal shuts her eyes, the horrors of the morning she found her infant son slain come rushing back.

WHENEVER Casey Veal shuts her eyes, the horrors of the morning she found her baby boy slain flood back.

Most of all, the heart-rending scream of elder son Xavier, as he saw his baby brother Zayden’s battered body, echoes in her nightmares.

“That sound will last forever,” she says.

Last week, almost two years to the day Zayden died, his killer was jailed for life for his callous crime.

But Casey has been serving her own life term ever since that June morning Harley Hicks, addled by the drug ice and out on a spree of burglaries, stole through the sleeping darkness of her Long Valley home and struck.

Inexplicably, he rained blows on sleeping 10-month-old Zayden with a copper baton, then fled, unseen, out into the bitter winter.

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When Casey and then partner Mathew Tisell woke, they found the doors to their Eaglehawk Rd home wide open, their belongings rifled through. Panicked, they called the police.

It was only then that they found Zayden, normally Casey’s restless “Mini Me”, lying unmoving beneath the covers in his cot.

Casey peeled them back to uncover the little boy’s bloodied, lifeless figure.

He was cold. Casey and Mathew worked frantically to revive him, in a desperate effort Supreme Court judge Justice Stephen Kaye later described as valiant.

Paramedics rushed his limp figure to the Bendigo Hospital, where a team of doctors continued the vain effort to resuscitate him.

Then her boy, gone forever, was handed back to her.

Yesterday, as Hicks was sentenced, the killer stared at the courtroom floor as Justice Kaye recounted in gruesome detail the injuries he inflicted upon a helpless child.

“At the time of his death, Zayden was on the threshold of childhood, with the future before him.

“He was in the safety of his own home, secure in his own cot,” the judge said.

“It is almost unthinkable that any human being could have carried out the sickening crime that you have committed. What you did was totally and utterly evil.”

Hicks must serve at least 32 years of his life term.

But Casey says: “I live in a jail in my own mind every day. My prison means I don’t sleep, I don’t eat, and I’m constantly sick because of stress.”

She and Xavier, whom she calls X-man, her superhero son, are inseparable. The spitting image of his father, James, the four-year-old carries the burden of both his own and his parents’ grief.

Casey talks freely, in the hope it will continue her late son’s legacy.

“As a grieving parent, it’s all I have left. Once you lose your child, all you have is their memory,” she says.

And she has begun building an army: Zayden’s Army — a fundraising force selling T-shirts and jumpers to give to Xavier the childhood of which he was robbed.

There are also plans for a children’s playground to be built in Zayden’s memory.

Casey cannot answer why a monster came lurking in the night to steal her son.

Hicks’s unspeakable crime has been compared with those of the convicted murderers Robert Farquharson and Arthur Freeman, who killed their own children.

But, as shocking as their crimes were, there was at least an explanation for them, although no excuse.

What drove Hicks’s crime remains lost in the darkness.

“I have minimal answers — but at least I can put a name to what happened to us,” Casey says.

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