Former Fort Belvoir Soldier Sentenced For Permanently Disabling Child, Raping Wife

ALEXANDRIA, VA — A former Fort Belvoir soldier was sentenced to 15 years in prison this week for assaulting and permanently injuring his newborn daughter and raping his wife.

Austin Blair Johnson was sentenced after he was convicted of two counts of assault resulting in serious bodily injury and one count of sexual abuse, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Virginia said in a statement.

According to prosecutors, Johnson, an active duty soldier residing on Fort Belvoir, was watching his infant daughter on June 24, 2012, who was born prematurely only 15 days earlier. The baby was crying, so Johnson picked her up and carried her, but she continued to cry.

While holding the infant in front of him with one hand under each of her arms, Johnson rapidly and forcefully shook her multiple times before letting her go, causing her to flip and land on her head.

Johnson then picked up the baby and ran with her upstairs to a bedroom where he woke the child's mother. Johnson falsely told the woman that he had accidentally dropped the infant and that he had successfully broken her fall with his foot.

The woman and Johnson took the child to the Fort Belvoir Community Hospital emergency room, where she presented with a fever, bruising on her head and shoulder, and blood coming out of her mouth. A CT scan conducted there revealed that the baby’s skull had been fractured.

The infant was later transferred to the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit at Walter Reed Medical Center. She was diagnosed with extensive injuries and remained hospitalized at Walter Reed for the next 10 days.

The day she was discharged, the infant was left in Johnson’s care while her mother was out. Johnson again rapidly and forcefully shook the baby and dropped her. She was 26 days old.

The following morning, the child's mother took her to a follow-up appointment with a pediatrician at Fort Belvoir Community Hospital. At the appointment, the infant began having seizures and was sent directly to the emergency room.

The baby was then transferred to the PICU at Children’s National Medical Center, where doctors discovered a myriad of injuries, including a second skull fracture and extensive brain damage.

When she was finally discharged on July 20, 2012, the infant was placed in the custody of Child Protective Services, where she remained for more than a year until she was returned to the custody of Johnson and her mother.

On June 22, 2015, shortly after her third birthday, the child was forced to undergo a hemispherectomy during which the entire left side of her brain was removed in an effort to control her irrepressible seizures.

According to prosecutors, the child is now legally blind, non-verbal and the entire right side of her body is paralyzed. Cognitively, she functions at the level of a mature infant.

In addition to his assaults on the child, in 2013 at their residence on Fort Belvoir, Johnson had sex with the child's mother without her consent after she rebuffed his requests to be intimate with her. She protested and tried to hit Johnson to get him to stop, which he eventually did.

As part of his sentence, Johnson was ordered to pay over $1.1 million in restitution.