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State of the Monarch
An Indiana man has been charged with beating his girlfriend’s 5-year-old son to death last weekend because he was “disrespectful.”
Brice Bainum, 32, has been charged with murder and interference with reporting a crime for trying to keep Halie Lewis, 23, from calling police after her son’s death, WNDU reported.
Lewis, meanwhile, has been charged with neglect of a dependent causing death.
A 911 call alerted first responders to a child not breathing on Sunday morning. They arrived at about 6:30 a.m. to find 5-year-old August Williams on his bedroom floor. Lewis told investigators she found him cold to the touch and tried warming him up with blankets and then put him in a hot shower.
According to court documents, she said the boy made noises but then went limp and his eyes rolled back into his head.
According to WSBT, she tried to call 911 when she first found the child, but Bainum snatched the phone from her hand and wouldn’t allow her to call for more than an hour, the court documents say.
The child was taken to a local hospital and then flown to a hospital in Chicago, where he died Sunday night.
An autopsy found that the boy suffered fatal head injuries, with his cause of death listed as “multiple injuries due to assault, a homicde.”
Investigators said that Lewis told them Bainum forced her son to take a cold shower the night before for “being disrespectful, according to WNDU. She said she found him on the floor of the bathroom, visibly shaken and crying, and that he appeared to have been hit.
She told Bainum at that point not to hit the boy anymore but he replied, “F*** you, he is not going to bite me” and put the child back into the cold shower.
Court documents say a neighbor who lives above Bainum and Lewis told police she heard a child’s voice saying, “No, please stop, I’ll be a good boy.” She also said she heard what sounded like thrashing in water, but it stopped and she heard nothing else until an ambulance arrived about an hour later.
According to charging documents, Lewis tole detectives she was afraid of Bainum, who she said was physically, sexually, and mentally abusing her. She also said he had a history of jealousy over attention she paid to her son as well as a history of cruelly punishing him.
They charged her anyway.
Bainum is being held on a $1 million bond and is due in court on March 11.
{Featured image: Brice Bainum/LaPorte County Jail]
