9-year-old boy pleaded 'please don't send me back to daddy' before he was beaten and tortured to death by him
An inquest has heard how a nine-year-old boy begged not to be returned to his father before he was brutally beaten to death by him. In 2016, Graham Stuart Dillon, of Canberra, killed his son Bradyn after subjecting him to repeated physical abuse, ABC News reports. At the inquest into his death held onTuesday, the boy's mother Rachel Jones couldn't hold her tears as she recounted her desperate attempts to save her son.
The devastated mother also spoke of the last time she saw Bradyn. "He had obvious bruising on his face, but Graham made him put the beanie on so you couldn't see the ones on his forehead," ABC News quoted her saying. "I vaguely remember there was a bruise on his leg, a big bruise, a kicking bruise."
Bradyn allegedly told her his father had strangled and yelled at him.
Justice John Burns sentenced Dillon to 41 years in prison after describing how the youngster was burnt with cigarettes, viciously punched and thrown around in a "brutal process of torture" inflicted by his own father in the days leading up to his death. In February 2016, Dillon told Bradyn to bend over a marble coffee table before punching and kicking him to his death.
Rachel told the inquest that in an earlier meeting with Victorian authorities, Bradyn had pleaded with them to "please don't send me back to daddy." Bradyn's mother also said she had desperately tried to get custody of her son, but that the Victoria court system continued to confuse her with different laws between states over custody.
The embattled child was, unfortunately, sent back to his abusive father. According to the Daily Telegraph, Rachel said Dillon had sent her images of bullets and a gun back in 2014, alongside a message that read "Christmas presents for you … tick tock b***h."
And while she had alerted authorities at Shepparton Police Station in Victoria about the post, she claims they did not want to touch the situation as it was under federal jurisdiction.
In the same year, Rachel had to travel to Canberra to retrieve her son after she learned he was undergoing a sexual examination in hospital after his father allegedly "interfered" with him.
"I put 300 grams of Seroquel in his coffee so he could go to sleep so I could take (Bradyn) without him harming us," she told the inquest. Seroquel is a drug with a side effect of drowsiness but is primarily designed to treat schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.
Furthermore, Rachel also made several phone calls to the ACT's Child and Youth Protection Services for Bradyn's sake, but to no avail. However, Dillon later managed to isolate Bradyn by pulling him out of school. Despite several reports from school teachers, child services closed the nine-year-old's case shortly after.
His teachers described him as a "courteous and respectful" child who added to a safe and welcoming environment, according to Rebecca Curran, the counsel assisting the coroner.
"The irony is that for Bradyn the community failed to provide a safe home environment," she said.