Brittany Ballenger had gone upstairs with her stepmom to try on a pair of jeans for an upcoming family gathering.

It was July 1, 2017, five weeks after Ballenger gave birth to her first child, Blair, in Butte, Mont. She asked her then-husband, former U.S. soldier Austin Blair Johnson, to watch their sleeping son.

Less than 10 minutes later, Ballenger heard “the strangest noise,” which she described as a faint whine coming from Blair. She rushed downstairs.

“Is this normal for Blair?” Johnson asked.

“What do you mean, ‘Is this normal for Blair?’ ” an alarmed Ballenger said.

“He handed Blair to me,” Ballenger recalled in a phone interview last week from her home in Helena, Mont.

“He was not responding at all. His eyes were rolled back and his whole body was limp.”

Less than a year later, Johnson was sentenced to 15 years in prison for shaking his infant son and causing severe brain injuries.

Judge Kurt Krueger told Johnson he had given his child “a life sentence,” and Ballenger the same sentence for taking away “the hopes and dreams” she had for her son living a normal life, the Montana Standard reported after the March 1, 2018, sentencing hearing in Butte-Silver Bow District Court.

What the court and Ballenger didn’t know then was that Johnson, 27 at the time, had done this twice before, to his first child from a previous marriage.

While on active duty at Fort Belvoir, Va., Johnson had violently shaken and dropped his daughter when she was 16 days old. He did it again 10 days later.

Military medical protocol requires hospital workers to notify criminal investigators and others if they even suspect child abuse. It’s unclear whether that happened but what is known is that the Army never court-martialed Johnson.

It took nearly 13 years for Johnson’s previous abuse to catch up with him.

He pleaded guilty to two counts of assault resulting in serious bodily injury, admitting in federal court on May 30 in Virginia to abusing his infant daughter in 2012 while an Army private living on post at Fort Belvoir, according to court documents and a Justice Department statement.

When asked to explain the timeline gap, the Justice Department provided a copy of the statement of facts entered as part of Johnson’s plea agreement.

“We can only provide information in the public record,” said Scottie Howell, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Eastern District of Virginia. “We respectfully decline to comment further at this time.”

The Army’s Criminal Investigation Division did not respond to a query last week asking whether Johnson was investigated for suspected child abuse while on active duty.

Johnson was an 11B infantryman in the regular Army from June 2010 to September 2013 and a 91B wheeled vehicle mechanic in the Army Reserve from March 2014 to May 2018. He left the Army as a specialist, the service said Monday.

Horrific injuries

Ballenger was 21 when she met Johnson through an online dating app while living in Colorado. It was July 2015 and Johnson was in the Army Reserve, she said.

They married nearly a year later at the courthouse in Butte, where they were living with Ballenger’s parents.

Ballenger knew Johnson had been married before and had a disabled daughter. He told Ballenger that the girl’s condition stemmed from complications at birth.

“None of that was true,” Ballenger said, but she learned the full extent of his lies only last week when reading the federal court documents for the first time.

Court filings from Johnson’s plea agreement hearing and a Justice Department statement piece together the details of the abuse.

Johnson lived on Fort Belvoir while on active duty from October 2010 to September 2013.

His daughter was born June 9, 2012, after an emergency cesarean section at Fort Belvoir Community Hospital. She was admitted to the neonatal intensive care unit at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, where she was intubated.

The baby, who is not named in court documents, eventually began breathing on her own and was discharged to go home a week after she was born.

At the time, her “newborn screen was normal,” according to court papers.

On June 25, 2012, Johnson was alone with his 16-day-old daughter for the first time when she began to cry.

Unable to console her, Johnson “snapped,” according to the court documents.

Holding her in front of him with one hand under each of her armpits, he “rapidly, forcefully and willfully” shook his daughter multiple times.

She “flipped in the air and landed on her head” when he let go.

Johnson told his wife at that time that he had accidentally dropped the baby and broken her fall with his foot. The couple took their daughter to the Fort Belvoir emergency room, where medical workers first saw a fever, bruising on her head and shoulder and blood coming from her mouth.

She was transferred to the pediatric intensive care unit at Walter Reed. An MRI identified a skull fracture, brain bleeding and swelling in the soft tissue between her throat and neck bones, among other injuries, court documents state.

The infant was at Walter Reed for 10 days and was sent home.

On July 5, 2012, the day she was discharged, the baby was left in Johnson’s care while his wife was out.

“With nobody else around, the defendant again rapidly, forcefully, and willfully shook” the victim “and dropped her,” court papers state. She was 26 days old.

Johnson’s wife returned to find that her daughter was lethargic, wouldn’t feed and was occasionally twitching. Johnson did not tell her what he had done.

The following morning, as the twitching worsened, the mother took the baby to a previously scheduled follow-up appointment with a pediatrician at Fort Belvoir Community Hospital. At the appointment, the baby began having seizures and was sent directly to the emergency room.

The injuries identified at Fort Belvoir and later at Children’s National Hospital in Washington, where she was intubated, included a second skull fracture, multiple rib fractures, a clavicle fracture, classic metaphyseal fractures in both wrists and the right tibia; soft tissue swelling on both sides and the back of her head; and extensive brain injuries.

She also had bruises in both of her armpits, on her shoulder and on her forehead. An eye exam revealed between 20 and 40 retinal hemorrhages.

The infant was hospitalized this time for 13 days.

Johnson’s daughter, now 12, is blind and nonverbal, and the entire right side of her body is paralyzed, according to the Justice Department statement on May 30.

Cognitively, she functions at the level of a mature infant.

In addition to assaulting his daughter, Johnson pleaded guilty on May 30 to sexually abusing his then-wife, who was not named, in 2013 at their residence on Fort Belvoir.

Lifelong disabilities

Ballenger’s son, Blair, is now 8 years old. She cares for him full time. Doctors initially told her he would be a vegetable, she said.

“To this day, he has proven everybody wrong,” she said.

He can talk and is able to walk with ankle braces up to his knees, Ballenger said. Like his half-sister, he’s fed through a tube, she said. He has autism, cerebral palsy, epilepsy and Tourette’s syndrome. He learns functional life skills in a special education classroom at school.

Blair was flown to the children’s hospital in Salt Lake City due to his injuries inflicted by Johnson.

He had brain trauma, a broken ankle and tailbone, and five broken ribs that appeared to be from prior abuse, Ballenger said.

When doctors showed her an MRI of Blair’s brain, they said white indicates damage.

“Every single part of his brain had white on it,” she said.

Doctors told her plainly that he had been abused.

While Blair was still hospitalized in Salt Lake City, Johnson’s ex-wife reached out to Ballenger to offer support and then revealed that she and other family members had suspected Johnson of prior abuse.

“They all figured that Austin did this” to his daughter, Ballenger said, “because her injuries were just like Blair’s.”

“When Blair’s case was done,” she said, the ex-wife “said she was going to fight tooth and nail” to get her daughter’s case opened in Virginia.

Justice for two babies

Ballenger questions how Johnson was allowed to get away with the abuse of his daughter, whose injuries were even worse than her son’s.

The left part of the girl’s brain was removed in 2015 in an effort to control her seizures, according to court documents.

If the Army had gone after Johnson or if his ex-wife or family had mentioned that they suspected him of abuse, “I would have, one, for sure never had Blair; but two, Blair and I would have not been in this situation.”

The anger comes in waves, she said, because she also wouldn’t trade her son for anything.

After Johnson’s daughter was hospitalized a second time, she was placed with Child Protective Services for 14 months before being returned to her parents, according to court documents.

Ballenger said that before he was arrested, Johnson told her that he had also hurt his daughter but got her back because he “took the parenting classes and did everything they asked of (him).”

Catherine Kimball-Eayrs, a pediatrician and retired colonel who finished her 27-year military career as the Army general pediatrics consultant to the surgeon general, said that based on the nature and severity of the injuries to Johnson’s daughter as described in court documents, “there’s no way it didn’t get reported.”

Kimball-Eayrs worked at Walter Reed during the period that Johnson’s daughter was abused, she said, but she doesn’t remember the case or the baby’s name.

Under federal law, medical providers are mandated reporters if they even suspect abuse or neglect, she said.

“You always look at the injury, listen to the story,” she said. “Does the injury match the story?”

The matter of which agency to notify depends on where the suspected abuse would have happened.

If it’s on a U.S. military installation, the report would be made to military criminal investigators and to the family advocacy program that works with the service member’s command.

In this case, Child Protective Services would not have removed a child from a home without a report and an investigation, she said.

What happened after that is hard to say, Kimball-Eayrs said. It’s up to a service member’s command to refer charges under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, she added.

“Maybe they decided it was a first-time incident, and he did the training and everything they asked of him,” she said of Johnson’s command.

“And this is where the bias comes in. I’ve seen it happen over and over again: ‘Oh, but he’s such a good soldier, he’s so valuable to the Army, he knows he did wrong, we’ve got to give him another chance.’ ”

Johnson is scheduled to be sentenced on Aug. 22. He faces up to life in prison.

Ballenger said she would testify at Johnson’s sentencing hearing, but prosecutors have not reached out to her.

“He deserves what he’s going to get,” she said of Johnson. “These babies need their justice.”