A man charged in the death of a 1-year-old child last year will serve another seven years in prison following a plea agreement that reduced his charge from capital murder to manslaughter.

Matthew Zachery Brown was arrested in March 2024 and initially charged with capital murder while engaged in felony child abuse after a child in his care died at Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital in Memphis.

On April 30, the charge was reduced to manslaughter, and Brown pleaded guilty. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison, with 12 years suspended.

With one year of credit for time already served, he will serve an additional seven years. After his release, he will be on supervised probation for seven years, followed by five years of unsupervised probation. If he violates probation at any point, he could be required to serve the remaining 12 years.

The case began on March 22, 2024, when the Lafayette County Sheriff’s Office responded to County Road 520 in Como after a 911 call reported an unresponsive child. According to court records, the child had been dropped off with Brown by the child’s mother on March 19. The child was not related to Brown.

Brown told investigators that the baby hit his head while on a porch swing on March 21 and sustained a bruise under the left eye. He said he placed the child in front of the television, and when he returned, the child was unresponsive. At the time, Brown was also caring for his two sons, ages 2 and 4.

The child was taken to Baptist Memorial Hospital–North Mississippi and later flown to Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital, where he died.

According to a report from the hospital’s CARES Team, the baby had bruises on his face, stomach, back, legs, buttocks, chest, forehead, and both sides of his head, along with an internal brain injury. The child suffered subdural hemorrhaging—a serious condition involving bleeding between the skull and the surface of the brain, typically caused by a head injury.

The report concluded that the head trauma was “nonaccidental” and noted that a child with such an injury would not have been able to eat, sit up, or play and would have become unresponsive shortly after the injury occurred. The bruises were found to be at various stages of healing and could not be precisely dated.