6-year-old boy dies after being tortured, beaten by babysitter, O.C. prosecutors say
Chance Crawford was a happy 6-year-old boy who loved “Sesame Street” and “Mickey Mouse Clubhouse.” The first-grader’s drawings of the Disney mascot were so detailed his family swears it was if he had pulled them straight out of a movie.
Chance died Tuesday, days after prosecutors allege his babysitter tortured him and beat him with a piece of lumber.
“Why would this happen to him? He didn’t get to live the rest of life,” Chance’s father, Vance Crawford, told KABC-TV. “He lived a happy life. He was great. He was a great kid. I love my son. I miss him so much. He didn’t deserve that.”
The man authorities say was babysitting the boy — Ernest Lamar Love, 41 — was charged this week with murder, torture and child abuse causing death, all felonies. He has pleaded not guilty and is being held without bail.
A lawsuit accuses Orange County and the city of Anaheim of failing to intervene to stop the abuse of two young girls by their father and stepmother.
On the evening of Aug. 29, after his third day of first grade, prosecutors say, Chance was dropped off at Love’s Placentia barbershop while his mother went to work a night shift as a nurse’s assistant at St. Joseph Hospital.
Authorities say Love took Chance to a local park, where the boy wet himself. Video surveillance later showed Chance following Love, who was carrying a large piece of raw lumber, into the barbershop, prosecutors said.
Once inside, prosecutors allege, Love beat the boy with the wood and poured hydrogen peroxide on the wounds. He then forced the injured boy to do push-ups, situps and jumping jacks, prosecutors said.
“Words do not exist to describe the absolute terror this little boy was forced to endure — all at the hands of someone who was supposed to be protecting him, not torturing him to death,” Orange County Dist. Atty. Todd Spitzer said in a statement.
A woman was accused of child abuse while pregnant with a baby who is now presumed dead. Child welfare officials in California and Utah did little to intervene.
Love’s attorney could not immediately be reached for comment Thursday.
Early Friday morning, prosecutors said, Love drove the boy to the emergency room at Children’s Hospital of Orange County. At 1:30 a.m., Love allegedly carried the boy, who was unconscious and struggling to breathe, into the hospital.
Doctors discovered missing flesh and “raw, gaping wounds” on the boy’s buttocks, along with extreme brain swelling and other injuries consistent with violent shaking, prosecutors said.
Four days after arriving at the hospital, Chance died.
In a GoFundMe campaign set up to cover funeral expenses for the boy, family members wrote that Chance was “always happy, always kind and always polite.”
“Chance would light up any room he walked in,” his family wrote. “He was smart, inquisitive and a great artist. He was a gifted child and had so much life to live.”
If convicted, Love faces a maximum sentence of 32 years to life in prison.
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