Child Abuse

You have to wonder how a father that would leave an 18-month-old locked in a hot car would get custody of his four kids to begin with. The outside temperature on the day this allegedly took place was nearly 100 degrees.

Cosimo Capitiano offered no explanation to the judge Monday about why he left his baby in a hot car Sunday, but his estranged wife’s attorney said he shouldn’t have had custody of the children to begin with.

The attorney representing the children’s mother, Aurelius Capitiano, said the father lied that she was keeping them in an unsafe home in south Florida so that he could get custody of them and avoid having to pay child support. Until he did that, the children had been with their mother. The judge’s decision Monday means all four children are going home with their mother.

Kathy Fishbough just happened to park her car at the Chuck E. Cheese parking lot next to Capitanio’s vehicle. She quickly realized the toddler was locked inside the car.

“All windows were up. The car wasn’t on. No keys in ignition. I was like, ‘You’ve gotta be kidding me,’” she said.

Foster parents are supposed to keep children safe. Where did the system go so horribly wrong, that Child Services would place a baby in the care of a woman and her boyfriend who brutalized, tortured and killed this poor little guy.

Her boyfriend, Lemar Martin, 25, was charged with assault and endangering a child’s welfare, as well as criminal possession of marijuana. The three lived in an apartment on Patchen Avenue in Bedford-Stuyvesant.

An autopsy yesterday found Kyle died from “multiple blunt impact injuries,” said Ellen Borakove, a spokeswoman for the city medical examiner. Police said more charges are pending.

The Associated Press reported that police said the boy had horrific signs of abuse, including a broken leg, and apparently had been sodomized before he died.

Cheatham’s and Martin’s relatives could not be reached yesterday.

A three month old infant had to have half of her skull removed resulting from injuries of torture and abuse by her father. The infant had bruises all over her body, a blood clot in the brain, a fractured skull, many fractured ribs, a fractured wrist which has left her with brain damage. Her doctors believed the baby wouldn’t survive, but she did, although her quality of life will be anybody’s guess.

A 23-year-old Alburtis man charged with attempted homicide involving his 6-week-old daughter Easter weekend — the baby suffered a fractured skull, leg and wrist fractures and six broken ribs and was expected to die but survived — had his formal arraignment in Lehigh County Court on Thursday.

David J. Walsh waived the reading of the charges and was returned to Lehigh County Prison, where he has been held under $750,000 bail since his April 7 arrest. A trial date has not been set.

A man sentenced to 6 years in prison for using industrial strength cleaner on a toddler’s face, just wound up with an additional 6 years for missing his court date. Would he like to try for 18?

Pulaski County Circuit Judge Barry Sims said Daniel Gary Price, 40, of North Little Rock had no legitimate excuse for missing a July 20 court date. The judge found Price guilty Friday of a felony failure-to-appear charge.

The judge added six years to Price’s six-year sentence from January when a jury convicted him of second-degree battery and misdemeanor child endangerment for burning his girlfriend’s son’s face with rust remover, nail-polish remover and an industrial cleaner. Price also was fined $10,000 for those crimes.

The child, Braxton Robinson, was 21 months old at the time and suffered second-degree burns.

We’ve heard of cougars before, but this is taking it a little far.

A 41-year-old woman accused of having a sexual relationship with a 13-year-old boy was charged Tuesday with three felony counts of sexual assault of a child.

Authorities discovered the relationship after Teresa M. Cantrall of Oshkosh let the boy drive a car and he was pulled over for speeding, police said.

A Wisconsin State Patrol trooper stopped a vehicle May 11 that was traveling about 80 mph on a Neenah highway. Cantrall told the trooper she was the boy’s mother and was teaching him to drive, police said. Cantrall and the boy were arrested.

A leading UK charity is claiming that children in post-conflict areas are being abused by UN peacekeepers and aid workers.

After research in Ivory Coast, southern Sudan and Haiti, the charity proposed an international watchdog be set up.

Save the Children said it had sacked three workers for breaching its codes, and called on others to do the same.

The three men were all dismissed in the past year for having had sex with girls aged 17 - which the charity said was a sackable offence even though not illegal.

The UN has said it welcomes the charity’s report, which it will study closely.

Save the Children says the most shocking aspect of child sex abuse is that most of it goes unreported and unpunished, with children too scared to speak out.

A woman who kept her 17-year-old adopted son in a cage, while also causing him to become seriously malnourished, has been sentenced to 20 years in prison. Not enough, in our opinion.

Brenda Sullivan pleaded guilty in January to three counts of aggravated child abuse. Prosecutors agreed to drop lesser child neglect charges.

The teen weighed 49 pounds when child welfare workers found him in 2005 in what appeared to be a cage. Sullivan told a judge at the time that Ohio authorities told her to keep the boy, who had severe medical and emotional problems, in a crib.

“There’s only one conclusion when you look at the medical evidence in this case, and that is that she literally starved him,” prosecutor Julie Schlax said.

Two other children, 13-year-old twins the Sullivans adopted as infants, both testified they were kept in similar cages.

Sheesh, how do you a) fill a bath with just hot water, and b) put a baby in it without testing the temperature first.

A 19-year-old man faces preliminary charges of child neglect after a 17-month-old girl was placed in scalding bathwater Thursday, police said.

The girl was being treated for third-degree burns at Riley Hospital for Children, said Sgt. Paul Thompson, spokesman for the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department.

Andrew E. Strohmeyer, 19, was arrested after detectives questioned him about the child’s injury.

A 20-year-old who broke into a house into an Indiana house and sexually assaulted a 5-year-old girl has been sentenced to 32 years in prison. We think there should be an extra zero at the end, but we’ll take it over a slap on the wrist that some of these sickos receive.

The girl has needed counseling, and her parents learned that she contracted a sexually transmitted disease from Jesus Alberto Valenzuela, Deputy Prosecutor Gillian DePrez said during a sentencing hearing.

A Marion Superior Court judge sentenced Valenzuela to 32 years in prison after he pleaded guilty to burglary and child molesting charges stemming from the early morning break-in Aug. 24.

Valenzuela, 20, nodded as an interpreter translated Senior Judge Charles Wiles’ questions before accepting his plea.

The girl’s parents attended but didn’t testify. The family has moved from the city.

We would have thought the ruling would be unanimous, but whatever.

The court, in a 7-2 decision, brushed aside concerns that the law could apply to mainstream movies that depict adolescent sex, classic literature or innocent e-mails that describe pictures of grandchildren.

The ruling upheld part of a 2003 law that also prohibits possession of child porn. It replaced an earlier law against child pornography that the court struck down as unconstitutional.

The law sets a five-year mandatory prison term for promoting, or pandering, child porn. It does not require that someone actually possess child pornography. Opponents have said the law could apply to movies like “Traffic” or “Titanic” that depict adolescent sex.

How can anybody be so cruel as to allow a severly disabled boy to die from bed sores so severe, it kills him? What did the hired nurses do all day?

Jaylen Brown needed round-the-clock care, and the 13-year-old developmentally disabled boy with cerebral palsy was supposed to have it. His mother had the help of two licensed practical nurses to care for her son seven days a week at their South Side home.

And yet the boy died Thursday of complications from “bone-deep bedsores” that the Cook County Public Guardian called a “a disgusting case of neglect” that a number of people should have seen before it was too late.

The boy’s death has been ruled a homicide, with the cause being blood poisoning from neglected severe bedsores, according to the Cook County medical examiner’s office.

Some solutions are better thought out than others, the solution to leave your girlfriend’s hungry toddler in a car while you go into a strip club — not such a good choice.

The topper: The girlfriend, who was at work, gave Baxter $20 to buy dinner for her 3-year-old daughter. The 20-year-old man instead used it for the cover charge and stripper tips at Shotgun Willie’s.

The manager of Fascinations porn shop next-door came to the rescue - flagging down a police officer May 10 to report the toddler alone in the locked car with the driver’s side window opened 3 inches.

“The child appeared very afraid, and seemed to ‘cower’ in the rear seat,” a Glendale officer wrote in the police report. “There was no food or water left in the vehicle.”

Texas officials have told the mothers of the children rescued from a polygamist sect that they need to abandon some of their religious teachings or they will lose custody of their kids.

Some lawyers believe this could mean women would never be able to return to the Yearning for Zion ranch in Eldorado, and would have to choose between some of their beliefs and their children.

But other experts said adults who have tolerated underage “marriages” of girls to older men and apparently have cast out teenage boys might have forfeited all rights to raise their children – and are lucky to be given a shot at regaining their youngsters.

In advance of court hearings that begin Monday, Child Protective Services has drafted 10 goals and 14 tasks that parents will have to work toward to regain custody of their children.

We don’t care if it was the most expensive makeup from Paris, toddlers routinely break stuff and it’s no reason to put the smackdown on them.

A Pasco woman who hit her 2-year-old son for getting into her makeup has been jailed for investigation of assault.

The 19-year-old appeared in court Monday and bail was set at $25,000 while prosecutors decide whether to charge her.

Police who were called Friday by the boy’s grandmother found scrapes and bruises on his face and bumps on his head.

A woman’s boyfriend chained a teenager up and beat her with the handle of a hammer for snoring, and then sent her off to school. There are just too many mother willing to sell their children’s souls and lives for their boyfriends. With a name like Bobbie Jo Davis, ignorance and stupidity probably come with the territory.

NEW CASTLE, Ind. - A prison guard beat his live-in girlfriend’s daughter in the head while she slept because of her loud snoring, police said.

Charles A. Williamson struck the 14-year-old four or five times with the wooden handle of a claw hammer, according to a probable cause affidavit. He told police he had asked the girl and her mother to move out because both of them snore.

Williamson, 46, is an officer at the New Castle Correctional Facility, about 45 miles east of Indianapolis. He was charged with two counts of battery and faces one count of criminal confinement after the girl complained she had been handcuffed to her bed. An officer at the Henry County Jail said Williamson had bonded out, and a message at a number listed under his name said the phone was disconnected.