Per reports, the mom, later identified as 37-year-old Joan, reportedly beat her 5-year-old son, Andrew, with a shower head for a sickening reason – because the boy soiIed himself. An autopsy revealed that the boy had been repeatedly struck in the head and that he had also inhaled his own blood before dying of blunt force trauma.
The mother pleaded guilty to first-degree murder and admitted to beating her son to death, burying his body, then falsely reporting him as missing.
During the sentencing, prosecutors said that the boy was captured on tape telling his mother 9 chilling words just two weeks before she killed him.
Prosecutors played a tape of an argument between the mother and little Andrew two weeks before his death. The boy, who prosecutors said the mother beat long before his death, can be heard on the tape telling his mother that he would like to have ‘really bad people’ do bad things to her so she would leave him with his father. ‘Why do you want those bad people to hurt me?’ the mother can be heard asking, according to The Daily Mail. ‘So I don´t ever see you again,’ the little boy answered.
Two weeks later prosecutors say he died alone in the dark, his head bearing the outlines of the shower head the mother struck him with after forcing him to stand under freezing water, a punishment for s0iling himself. In court, the mother cried and wiped her nose as the tape was played, but according to prosecutors, she had been mercilessly abusing Andrew long before his death. Even as the heartbreaking details of the boy’s life were heard in court, however, the mother played the part of a grieving mother, acting as if her child was killed by someone else as she begged for mercy from the judge. The prosecutor read statements from neighbors who noticed the boy with cuts and bruises years before his death. Local police department officer and an emergency room doctor, who both saw a softball-size bruise on Andrew’s hip four months before he died, also testified.
Both Officer Kimberley and Dr. Channon asked Andrew about the bruise. Police said they also visited the home and found the residence filthy and reeking of f-ces, but perhaps the eeriest evidence presented was the text messages the boy’s parents exchanged after the mother killed the boy but before his body was found. In those messages, it seemed the couple was trying to cover their tracks, writing things they thought police would eventually see. Pretending their son was still alive, they discussed plans for Andrew and his brother, and the boy’s father even told his wife to “give the boys a kiss and hug for me.” The boy’s father, Andrew Sr., pleaded guilty to aggravated battery of a child, involuntary manslaughter and concealment of a homicidal death. He was sentenced to 30 years in prison. The boy’s mother was sentenced to 35 years in prison.
