A 3-year-old boy was repeatedly beaten for five months in a New Jersey home as punishment for peeing on the floor.
Patricia Buchan, 29, of Newark admitted to assaulting a 3-year-old boy she cared for as punishment for urinating on the floor of her son’s bedroom in an apartment she shared with 5 other adults and five other children.
Patricia Buchan said that she told the boy to take off his clothes, get in a bathtub and then took a pot of boiling water from the stove and poured it over his lower body, resulting in second-degree burns, the Essex County Prosecutor’s Office announced Friday.
“This child lived his first three years in a house of horrors,’’ Essex County Assistant Prosecutor Michael Morris said in a statement. “Today’s plea resolves the case without the ordeal of the children having to testify.” Buchan, and the five other adults living in the Clinton Place apartment, were originally charged with aggravated assault and endangering the welfare of a child, along with but prosecutors did not say what Buchan plead guilty to in their statement Friday. Prosecutors have said the abuse of boy, which began in July 2018 was a “systematic and coordinated beating” of the child with a belt and their fists by the adults. They also poured scalding water on him to punish him, officials said. The child, hospitalized in order to treat his injuries, was treated and released from the hospital and was in protective custody, Newark police said last year.