EVERETT — A Snohomish County father allegedly admitted he beat his son with a belt, kept whipping when the boy tripped down a flight of stairs and left the child with severe head injuries, according to police reports.
The father, 24, was trying to teach the alphabet to his son Monday at a home south of Everett. The boy struggled to learn the letters. The father grabbed a belt and started to whip his son, according to the man’s statement to a Snohomish County sheriff’s deputy.
Eventually, the 5-year-old child ran from the room. The father chased him, hitting him as he rushed upstairs. At the top of the steps, the father whipped the boy, who fell downstairs and crashed into a wall, according to his statement. The father told a deputy he kept whipping, even as his son rolled.
“I got out of control,” the man reportedly told the deputy.
Afterward, the father sat down with his son in the dining room. He tried again to teach him the alphabet, he told the sheriff’s deputy. But the boy was bleeding from the nose. The father told him to take a shower, before his girlfriend came back from work, court papers say.
Later he tried to feed his son, but the child refused and took a nap, the man reported. Once the boy woke up, he was having trouble seeing. He vomited, rolled his head, held his chest and seemed to be struggling to breathe. The father called for an ambulance around 5 p.m.
Paramedics saw a burst blood vessel in the boy’s eye, fresh injuries on his back and legs, and signs of older trauma.
The child was treated at Swedish Mill Creek. A nurse removed the boy’s shirt to reveal he was covered in red imprints, the size of a belt. Police saw his left ear had swollen to at least twice the size of the right. Additionally, X-rays showed internal bleeding in the head. The boy was transferred to Seattle Children’s Hospital.
The man agreed to talk with police. He’d been having a “rough day,” and had fought over the phone with his girlfriend, he reportedly explained. He was already mad when he became frustrated with his son.
Usually he hit the child by spanking him with open hands, he continued, and he didn’t realize how hard he’d been striking him with the belt until he saw the marks.
“I found it weird because he was not crying with each hit, he would just groan and then he tried to run,” he said, according to the court papers.
The man wrote a two-page statement about what happened. He was booked into the Snohomish County Jail around 8 p.m. for investigation of first-degree assault of a child. A judge set bail on Tuesday at $100,000 and ordered that he have no contact with minors.
A deputy asked the man if he knew why he was arrested.
“Yes,” he reportedly answered. “Because I went too far.”
Caleb Hutton: 425-339-3454; chutton@heraldnet.com. Twitter: @snocaleb.
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