Child Abuse Cases Lead To Arrests

Mom didn’t believe her 30-year-old boyfriend would abuse her toddler. She didn’t believe he really abused kids in the past. So the cops stepped in.

That was one of two child-abuse cases wrapped up over the past week by the New Haven police department’s ​“special victims unit.”

In some respects, the cases resemble others that come into the unit at a rate of one or two each week. On the other hand, like all such cases involving children, in revealing a sample of the kind of abuse suffered by children, the cases present their own unnerving details, and point to some of the challenges to preventing future incidents of abuse.

In the case of the 30-year-old boyfriend, Sgt. Betsy Segui, who heads the unit, draws this conclusion: ​“The mothers of these kids really need to start believing from the beginning. They have this notion that kids lie about everything. A lot of them take the boyfriend’s side. That’s a problem.”

Segui offered the following account of the case. (The court file is sealed.)

The mother was regularly leaving her three children — ages 3, 6, and 11 years old — in the care of her boyfriend while she went to work. The boyfriend already had pleaded guilty to six felony child sexual abuse charges in the past, according to state records; he served a six-year sentence that was suspended after three years. He was subsequently cited for violating probation three times. His name is on a sexual offender registry.

However, in this case, the court did not place any restrictions on his being near children.

In May the mother took the 3 year-old to an annual physical examination. She later said she hadn’t known of any allegations of her boyfriend mistreating the child.

The doctor noticed a bruise on the child’s body. ​“The child opened up and disclosed the fact that the mother’s boyfriend was punishing him by flicking him with his two fingers on the scrotum and the penis area,” Segui said. The doctor discovered that the boyfriend has ​“caused severe bruising to part of his penis shaft and his scrotum and in between the buttock area.” As protocol requires, the doctor informed the police. Segui’s unit investigated, contacted the state Department of Children and Families, and obtained an order to keep the boyfriend away from the children.

The subsequent investigation led to the man’s arrest on felony charges of third-degree sexual assault and risk of injury to a minor, on a warrant prepared by Detective Ryan McFarland. The man has not entered a plea; he is being held on $50,00 bond. He had a court appearance Tuesday; his case was continued until Dec. 16.

Segui said investigators discovered that the boy had told the mother what happened. She didn’t believe him.

“He’s 3. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” the mother allegedly told investigators.

The 7 year-old sibling told the mother, ​“Yes, I saw that happened.” (The oldest child wasn’t aware of the alleged abuse.)

The mother further said she hadn’t know about the boyfriend’s prior record of being placed on the sex offender registry. She refused to believe the record when informed of it. ​“She just said he’s a good parent, a good stepfather, a good person. She still believes that it’s all incorrect.” She told police the boy was probably ​“flicked by another playmate.”

DCF has approved having the children stay with an aunt.

Undiagnosed Mental-Health Woes

The other case from the past week involved the arrest of a 23-year-old woman who lives in Fair Haven Heights. The woman was at work one day last week; she left her baby in the care of her mother (the baby’s grandmother).

At 12:55 the grandmother called police. The grandmother said that at noon she had begun to ​“change her granddaughter’s diaper because she had been crying and kicking her feet. She noticed that the baby’s socks were wet and when she took the socks off, the skin of the baby’s feet came off,” according to a subsequent report written by Officer Amando Vale. ​“She noticed blisters and realized the child’s feet had been burned, she believed, when the child’s mother … gave her a bath earlier in the morning before leaving for work.”

The grandmother had heard the baby scream earlier that morning; the baby’s mother told her the baby ​“was crying about getting a bath as usual,” according to the report. The mother ​“dressed and left for work at about 9:00 a.m. and never said anything.”

The child was taken by ambulance to Yale-New Haven’s Children’s Hospital, then to the burn unit at Bridgeport Hospital. Staff there reported that ​“the child’s burns were severe and that the circulation to the child’s feet could have been affected, which could result in the child’s feet being amputated.”

The mother was charged with first-degree assault, second-degree reckless endangerment and risk of injury to a child. She has not yet entered a plea; she has a court date scheduled next week. She has been released on a promise to appear in court. A judge ordered her into a court-mandated mental-health treatment program.

“I believe that the mental health issue of the mother played a role in what she did to her child that day,” said Segui, who was familiar with the woman from her time as a patrol officer. ​“I believe there’s a condition that’s been undiagnosed in her.” The baby remains in the custody of DCF.

It’s typical for Segui’s unit to receive one to two new trauma cases like these each week, she said. The unit handles overs 600 cases a year of sexual assault and domestic violence involving both adult and child victims. She estimated that 75 of the cases involve children, and that 25 to 30 percent of those cases involve sexual abuse.

Segui, the mother of a 10-year-old daughter, has run the unit for about a year now. She was asked how being a parent affects her ability to handle the continual stream of heart-wrenching cases. (Click here to read a previous story about her experiences growing up in a house where child abuse took place.)

“It only makes it that much easier for me to do the cases,” she responded. ​“You see what happens to these kids. It makes you work that much harder.”