Prosecutors in Salem, Massachusetts, will be pursuing a child abuse conviction against a man who allegedly beat his girlfriend’s son and filled his mouth with hot sauce before taping it shut for hours.
Police found the three-year-old boy alone in a hotel room this week with scratches and bruises all over his body. The child wasted no time telling police exactly who inflicted the injuries upon him.
It was his mom’s boyfriend, the child said, who left him with a huge bruise on his leg after beating him with a shoe. Same story for the belt-shaped bruises on his thigh and buttocks. And the scratch on his face? The child did that to himself in an effort to remove the duct tape “daddy” placed over his mouth after filling it with hot sauce.
The child said his mother’s boyfriend, identified as 21-year-old Christopher Delcid, punished him “every day. Daddy says I’m bad every day.”
On the day the boy’s mouth was taped shut, Delcid and the child’s mother left him alone at their apartment for over three hours. Police waited with the child until his parents returned and arrested them on the spot.
The abused boy and the mother’s other two children are now all in custody of the Massachusetts Department of Children and Families. Criminal records show the child’s mother, Katherine Rodriguez, has been arraigned on multiple child abuse charges in the past.
Delcid’s defense lawyer, meanwhile, has chosen a peculiar line of reasoning to defend his client with. Lawyer Paul Moraski says the child suffers from ADD and that he routinely accuses his caretakers of hurting him. As for the bruises all over the child’s body? Moraski says the boy purposefully hurts himself by slamming his body into things.
