Brandon Cervera: Texas dad made son, 4, drink sanitizer before starving him to death
SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS: A 28-year-old man was arrested by San Antonio police on Thursday, February 24, in connection with the death of his four-year-old son, Benjamin. According to an arrest affidavit, Brandon Cervera was arrested after police obtained footage of the child begging for food and water. The boy reportedly starved to death in the summer of 2021.
As per the arrest affidavit, obtained by KSAT, Cervera also forced Benjamin to drink sanitizer. Police reportedly obtained chilling footage from the phone of a family member of the child, following which they arrested Cervera on a charge of injury to a child. Benjamin was found unresponsive with bruises on his body before being taken to a hospital.
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Benjamin had been reportedly sleeping in a locked room with a frameless mattress, which was found covered in urine stains. The affidavit claimed that cabinets and the refrigerator of the boy’s Texas home were discovered locked. Bexar County Medical Examiner’s Office confirmed that Benjamin’s cause of death was due to starvation. Reportedly, there is another suspect in the case who has not been apprehended yet.
This horrific incident is an echo of the death of Arthur Labinjo-Hughes, a six-year-old boy from New York who was killed by his father and stepmom. In disturbing sound bites, the boy was heard crying "no one loves me" before his father and stepmom allegedly poisoned and tortured him to death. Thomas Hughes, 29, and Emma Tustin, 32, were accused of murdering Arthur Labinjo-Hughes, who reportedly suffered an "unsurvivable brain injury". Arthur was subjected to a "campaign of cruelty" before he died, that matched the “medical definition of child torture”.
At the time of their arrest, police released audio and video clips that were played to jurors at the murder trial. Arthur was heard crying "no one loves me" four times in one recording. In another, he repeatedly said "no one is going to feed me". Another video footage showed the little boy waking up on a living room floor in Shirley, Solihull, so weak that he could barely stand and pick up his bedding. The footage showed Arthur trying to stand up and carry is bedding with a lot of difficulties. He stumbles and limps as he steps out of the room.
Tustin allegedly beat Arthur to death on June 16 and called 911 13 minutes later to tell them that he was "barely breathing" after he "headbutted the floor". Paramedics later found Arthur "lying on his back, completely lifeless, quite pale with purple lips". Arthur died in a hospital the following day. The cause of death was given as a "head trauma inflicted on him by an adult" consistent with being "vigorously shaken and his head banged repeatedly against a hard surface". Doctors found that he was "unable to put up a fight" before his death because he had been poisoned with a tremendous amount of salt. The child had more than six spoons worth of the substance in his system, and a medic had never seen a level higher than that.