Left: Ariel Horn. Right: Charles McClellan Jr. (Tucson Police Department).
An Arizona woman and her boyfriend are going to prison after their neglect of her 11-year-old special needs son led to his death.
Ariel Lea Horn, 34, received a seven-year prison sentence while her 30-year-old boyfriend Charles Jackson McClellan Jr. will spend three-and-a-half years behind bars, Tucson CBS affiliate KOLD reported. Both will receive credit for the roughly 10 months of jail time already served.
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Tucson police said in a press release its investigation began in November 2023 when officers responded to a home in the 900 block of East Limberlost Drive for a report of an unresponsive child. Paramedics from the Tucson Fire Department pronounced the boy dead on scene. Detectives from the agency’s Child Physical Abuse Unit assumed the investigation and after conducting several interviews learned the boy who was “completely dependent on care from his guardians” was suffering from numerous medical conditions. Horn was the boy’s mother.
An autopsy showed he had numerous lesions throughout his lower body and subsequently developed sepsis. Cops never publicly identified the boy.
“The sores on the child’s body were attributed to not receiving proper medical attention and neglect by his mother and her boyfriend,” police said.
Detectives also found the pair were heavy fentanyl users. There were three other children who lived in the home.
School officials also sounded the alarm when they saw all the sores on the boy. They said he would need a doctor’s appointment before returning to school, KOLD reported, citing court documents. But the couple never took the boy to the doctor and he missed several appointments. Cops said the boy would spend long periods without being moved or adjusted, “creating an environment for bacteria to grow and skin to break down,” which is what allowed the sores and lesions to develop.
Cops arrested Horn and McClellan on May 1 on charges of first-degree murder and child abuse. The two in January agreed to plead guilty to intentional child abuse, a third-degree felony, according to records.
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