My partner shook our six-month-old son to death because he wouldn’t stop crying

A GRIEVING mum has revealed her heartbreak after her violent partner killed their six-month-old baby by shaking him to death.

Little Ruben Sweet-Harris, six months, died in May 17 after suffering two aneurysms when dad Lee Sweet, 26, shook him because he wouldn't stop crying.

Speaking on the Channel 4 show, A Year of British Murder, mum Aisha Harris revealed she tried to convince herself Ruben had been taken away by social services as the truth was too hard to handle.

The 20-year-old mum from Plymouth said: “I don’t know what I’m meant to say or do. I think my brain is very good at covering things up. I know what’s happened, but I don’t think it‘s real.

“I knew I was an amazing mum, but it was so much easier thinking he was taken off me by social services and having that chance to see him again.

“But you can’t sit and live in your little fantasy land and pretend he’s with his grandparents or he’s with his aunties and uncles or taken off you by social.

“That’s one thing that I did imagine for so long because you don’t want to be able to say goodbye to your own child.”

Sweet has been alone with Ruben in May 2017 when he lost his temper over the baby boy’s incessant crying.

Grabbing him by the ribs he shook him until he was unconscious, then called an ambulance.

But Ruben died three days later from his injuries – becoming one of 25 babies murdered in the UK in 2017.

In June, Lee Sweet, 26, pleaded guilty to manslaughter and was sentenced to five years and four months at Plymouth Crown Court.

During the trial, Aisha said she had thought about taking her own life after her son’s tragic death.

In her statement in court, Aisha said: “I will never again hold him in my arms, I will never kiss his face and worst of all, I will never hear his first words.

“I can only imagine the fear that filled my little man.”

After slamming the lenient sentence, Aisha and her family launched a campaign to have terms for infanticide increased.

She told the Plymouth Herald: "I don’t think that we can do anything to change this sentence. We don’t want other families to go through what we have. We want to help others get the justice which we did not.

“You get more for dealing heroin or cocaine than you do for killing a child. He should have got 15 years. That is a long time, he would be in his 40s.

“This way he walks out at about the time that Roo would have been starting nursery”.