PLATTE CITY, Mo. — According to court documents, a 36-year-old male suspect admitted to spanking his son, but police and the boy’s mother are calling it abuse. FOX 4 spoke the boy’s mother on Friday night, she and the boy’s father are divorced. We’re not showing you the mother’s face in order to conceal the child’s identity.
“I just want everyone to know that it was more than a spanking,” the 11-year-old boy’s mother said.
The boy’s mother held back tears as she flashed back to Sunday night when her son said his father severely beat him at the father’s home in Platte City.
“A spanking isn’t leaving welts. It isn’t making big bruises and blisters on someone’s bottom, you know? It isn’t punching him in the head and calling him fat,” the mother said.
Court documents reveal the father told police he spanked his son because the boy went to a Sonic Drive-In restaurant with his cousin without permission. On Monday morning the fifth grader went to school and told the principal and counselor, who called police and social workers.
Police then arrested the dad on a child abuse charge.
“He said that it hurt so bad he couldn’t sit on his bottom at all,” the mother said. “You can see his indentions of his fingerprints, black and blue and swollen.”
The boy told police his father spanked him more than 30 times. During a police interview, the father said it was “shocking” that the spanking had left marks on the child.
“Eventually he picked him up by his neck, slammed him on the floor. He punched him in the head three times. He called him horrible names,” the mother said. “And he told me he begged his dad to stop hitting him over and over, you know? Tears in his eyes, he’s just asking him to stop.”
She said while her son’s physical scars have begun to heal, the 11-year-old still has emotional scars and will need counseling.
“He’s not sleeping much, he has nightmares. He loves his father, but he’s scared to death, he should pay for what he’s done,” the mother said.
The father remains in jail on a $30,000, cash only bond and is due back in court on Tuesday.
