Police fatally shoot Turlock man who beats toddler to death

The Associated Press –

Published 5:14 pm PDT Sunday, June 15, 2008

http://www.sacbee.com/102/story/1015583.html

TURLOCK — A Turlock man was fatally shot by police as he kicked, punched and stomped a young toddler to death in front of horrified motorists who tried to stop the attack on a dark country road, authorities said.

Investigators were trying Sunday to establish the relationship between the 27-year-old suspect and the dead child. The Stanislaus County coroner said the boy appeared to be between 1 and 2 years old based on his size, according to county sheriff’s deputy Royjindar Singh.

“It’s been a long night of wondering why, not only for the officers and the passers-by who stopped and tried to help out, but for anyone. Why would somebody do this?” Singh said.

The suspect had a child’s car seat in the back of his four-door pickup truck, which caught the attention of an elderly couple at 10:13 p.m. Saturday because it was stopped in the two-lane road facing the wrong direction, Singh said.

As they got closer, the couple saw the man brutally beating the toddler behind his truck and throwing the child on the ground, according to Singh. Two or three other cars stopped, an unusual number to be passing through the remote area surrounded by a dairy, a cow pasture, a cornfield and a farmhouse, he said.

“What we got from witnesses is he was punching, slapping, kicking, stomping, shaking,” Singh said. “They tried to intervene and get involved, but their efforts really didn’t have an effect. The suspect was engaged in what he was doing. He just pushed them off and went back to it.”

A sheriff’s helicopter responding to emergency calls from the area landed in a cow pasture at 10:19 p.m. carrying a Modesto police officer who shot the man to death after he refused an order to stop beating the child, Singh said.

Paramedics tried to resuscitate the toddler, who was not breathing when they arrived. The boy was taken to a local hospital where he was pronounced dead.

Singh said the coroner does not plan to confirm the identities of the suspect and victim until Monday. Because his injuries were so severe, the child will have to be identified through a blood or DNA test, according to Singh.

No children within the dead boy’s age range have been reported kidnapped or missing in Stanislaus County, he said.

The incident happened on Bradbury Road about 10 miles west of Turlock, a city located about halfway between Sacramento and Fresno.

I can’t find words for how shocked and appalled I am by what this man did. What makes matters worse is the thought that none of the people witnessing this mounted enough courage and strength to stop this guy from killing this poor, innocent, helpless child. I know quite a few people who aren’t fond of children, yet they would not stand idly by or just make a token effort to stop someone from doing something like this to a helpless baby; as a matter of fact, many of them would probably enjoy having an excuse to beat the shit out of a poor excuse for a human being like this baby-beating beast.

I also feel appalled at the amount of satisfaction I derived from the fact that the son of a bitch was shot and killed. Instead of praying that he prayed for repentance when he died, I found myself enjoying a mental image of an enraged Jesus Christ personally flinging the murderer into Hell. (For those readers who are not familiar with Jesus’s feelings about children, he loved them very, very much, and he even chewed out his followers when they drove away the children who wanted to see and talk to Jesus, because the children’s needs weren’t as important as those of the adults, in the minds of his followers. Jesus did not agree–in fact, he went so far as to say that the Kingdom of Heaven belonged to children. He also praised the purity of faith that every child has before they become world-weary, cynical, bitter adults. I could see the normally mellow and loving Jesus losing it over being faced with someone who murdered a child so brutally.)

I’d like to know why this asshole murdered this baby, but I most likely will never find out. It was probably something stupid, like the child crying because it was hungry or had a dirty diaper or missed its mother or something. Worse yet, the bastard might have decided that killing the baby was a great way to punish the mother…or a way to get out of his responsibilities, as I suspect he was either the child’s father or tied to the child’s mother somehow.

At least the kid’s in a better place now…but I’m sure that he or she had family that loved him or her and would have taken him or her if they knew that the kid was in danger.