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Mom sentenced for keeping son in 'torture chamber' for years

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http://kutv.com/news/local/mom-sentenced-for-keeping-son-in-torture-chamber-for-years

(KUTV) Brandy Jaynes, 36, was sentenced to up to 45 years in prison for torturing and often starving her 12 year-old son and locking him in a bedroom and bathroom for years.

Prosecutor Angie Reddish-Day said the boy was locked up for at least two years, maybe as many as seven.

“The abuse this victim was subjected to at the hands of his own mother was incomprehensible,” said Reddish-Day who said the state went after the harshest punishment for Jaynes.

Jaynes, who lived in Toquerville, Utah, pleaded guilty to three counts of intentional child abuse causing serious injury.

She received the maximum penalty: three sentences of up to 15 years in prison to be served back to back to back.

Her public defender, Edward Flint, disagreed with the three sentence terms saying the abuse was one big incident that deserved one sole charge – not three.

“None of us understand how it got to this point. She certainly doesn’t,” he said when asked why his client abused her child.

Reddish-Day said the abuse was intentional, given that Jaynes had a camera in the bathroom that transmitted a live, continuous feed of her son where she could watch his suffering daily.

“There’s no other case like it,” she said.

Reddish-Day said the boy was initially locked in a bedroom where he was forced to lay on a board, then had icy water poured on him.

When the boy would defecate, he was moved to the shower. He was kept in the shower for some time with a board around the shower kept him from escaping.

The prosecutor said the boy said he would eat in the shower and investigators found food remnants and pieces of food cans in the shower.

The bathroom door was bolted shut.

The boy, now 13, told investigators he believed he’d been locked up since age 7 or 8.

His physical exams support his story according to the prosecutor.

“His learning had stopped at first or second grade. His bones had stopped growing at a 6-year-old level,” Reddish-Day said.

Some family members told investigators they hadn’t seen the boy for two Christmases and Jaynes made excuses for his absence.

The boy’s father lived in the house and was the one who took him to the hospital eventually.

Flint suggested the boy’s father was to blame – even though the father is not charged with any kind of abuse in the case. He lived on the bottom floor and the abuse happened in the floor above.

“Maybe she was brainwashed. Her husband was abusive, the marriage was falling apart, the drug abuse started four months before the arrest,” Flint said.

He said the victim’s twin sister is the one who locked him up.

The boy, who was 30 pounds when he was removed from the house, is now 60 pounds, but a boy his age should weigh 95.

A doctor who treated him said in court that he could barely walk when she first met him.

He had sores on his body and his skeletal system was in poor shape.

Jaynes originally said her son had developmental issues – perhaps autism – and she was overwhelmed.

Reddish-Day said there is no evidence the boy had any issues that would make the mother feel overwhelmed or give her reason to take him out of school.

He has no learning disability or autism.
 
This sounds like A Child Called It, jesus christ.

Hope the kid can get better and recover enough emotionally to be able to love a somewhat normal life. He'd make a helluva motivational speaker.
 

DonShula

Member
Well now I want to adopt this kid. What an awful thing. Unspeakable.

Anyone who knew about this should be removed from society forever.
 

Auctopus

Member
This is nightmareishly awful but was there a reason you posted it? Were you trying to begin a discussion because I don't think you'll find any response besides "That's awful."
 

Kilrogg

paid requisite penance
The whole family should be put in jail. There is no way (after two years) that people don't start asking questions. SAD!

Your post sounded serious, but now with that Trump-like ending I'm not sure anymore.

If you're being serious, I don't think you could put the twin sister in jail. Too young for that. Also, who knows how badly the mother and/or father manipulated or threatened her into locking her sister up. With a family like that doing things like this to children from an early age, it's hard to put any blame on the sister.

That's unless we eventually hear that the twin sister knew what she was doing. Then she's a piece of shit in the making. But even then, I wouldn't be nearly as hard on her as I would be on the parent(s). She's a child.
 
Absolutely fucking nuts man. obviously this is an extreme example, but trying to make a point beyond this horrible situation, I really feel like the culture in the US encourages parents to believe they have unaccountable ownership of their children.

You see this a lot with prominent cases like the Charlie Gard thing; the legal and cultural attitude in the US is that parents have absolute authority over their children, superseding the government and child's rights. A third of US states allow corporal punishment in schools, and none bans it at home. The US is the only UN Member State not party to the UN Convention on Rights of the Child (UNCRC).
 
The most striking thing about this is the boy believes he had been locked up since he was 7 or 8.

When it gets to the point that you can't make out the correct passage of time for that long, it's insane.
 

Preezy

Member
burn in hell demonic fiends

i hope that child can recover, but if he does it'll take many many years. may god give him strength.
Kinda makes you wonder why God didn't give him the strength to escape in the first place, huh? I guess he just works in mysterious ways.
 
How could you do that to anybody, let alone your own child? Absolutely horrific.

And what the fuck was the dad playing at? He should be fucking locked up as well, no way he didn't know what was going on.
 

FyreWulff

Member
This sounds like A Child Called It, jesus christ.

Hope the kid can get better and recover enough emotionally to be able to love a somewhat normal life. He'd make a helluva motivational speaker.

down to the ice water torture. I guess abusers all got the same playbook. fuck.

Wait how is the father not getting charged ? Also I am still confused how the twin sister is involved.

abusive parents often use the kids against each other. other kids will go along because survival.
 
I always try to advocate for rehabilitation of criminals. We don't need our prison system cluttered with suffering addicts, harmless perverts, and small-time miscreants. Not to mention droves of the disenfranchised, poor and mentally ill.

People like this woman, on the other hand, are what we have jail for. The utter lack of empathy and sheer sadism on display here is beyond forgiveness, and her removal from society is entirely just.
 
So the families story about the boy missing Christmas gatherings doesn't line up with the boys account and the confirming medical account timelines. Either the extended family is lying or they ignored his deteriorating condition over a multiple year period when the mother brought him out of his captivity
 
I work with a kid who went through similar. 7 years chained to a bed by her grandmother and regularly sexually abused by her uncle. When she came in she looked like a holocaust victim, all bones and skin, about 65 pounds at 13 years old. We had to spend hours encouraging her to eat. She was cognitively at toddler level. This happens more often than you'd think.
 

openrob

Member
People hate state intervention and control in people's lives but if simple checks are made e.g. is child in school, if not, why? Home schooled, make occasional checks, health checks etc., Then it saves lives.

Stuff like this prevents abuse like that.
 
The thing that does not make sense about these stories to me is how does a whole family get to a point where they are in on it and allow the abuse to happen. The father and twin sister perplex me in this situation. I just cannot imagine. Like seriously, how do you live like that and how does that become your normal? They deserve to be sentenced for locking him up and allowing it to happen.
 
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