A Texas father of two has been charged with child abandonment after his
six-year-old daughter strangled her one-year-old brother with a seat
belt.According to court documents filed on Friday, 26-year-old Adrian
Dreshaun Middleton from Houston left his two children in his car
unattended and went shopping at a store for more than an hour.Mail
Online reported that Middleton turned himself in at the Baytown Police
Department around 3 p.m over the May 20 incident. He told law
enforcement he gave the youngsters snacks and water, turned on the air
conditioning and played a movie before leaving them alone in the vehicle
for only 30 to 45 minutes.
However,
surveillance cameras showed he was gone between 10.45am and 12.15pm and
also didn't check on them after he claimed to have checked on the
children through a store window and thought they were fine. Middleton
told deputies when he got back to his car, he put the shopping bags in
the trunk and realized his daughter was crying. He said his daughter
told him she had to use the restroom and that she did something bad.When
he looked inside the car he saw his son was unconscious with the
seatbelt wrapped around him. Middleton then called 911 and began CPR on
the boy until paramedics arrived.According to the report, the child was
taken to Texas Children's Hospital where he was pronounced dead.His
6-year-old daughter also told an investigator she was playing with her
brother, and when she stopped playing, he started crying. She said she
became angry and wrapped the seatbelt around the baby. The girl said he
stopped crying, and she thought he was sleeping, but he was
dead.Prosecutors claim Middleton put his son at 'an unreasonable risk of
harm, namely, and a reasonable person would have believed that such
circumstances would place the Complainant in imminent danger of death,
bodily injury, physical impairment and mental impairment'.Licensed
Professional Counselor Bill Prasad says a 6-year-old child does not have
the mental capacity to truly understand their actions, so cannot be
blamed."Six-years-old (is) too young to be held accountable for this,”
Prasad said. "As adults, we have trouble in those situations. A
6-year-old has virtually no impulse control. So you really cannot trust a
6-year-old in that situation to be able to restrain his or herself and
make a good decision.”Prasad cautions most children are not able to make
those kinds of decisions until much later, therefore should not be
given that kind of responsibility until their teens."13 years of age,
with supervision, with training, with access to emergency services, with
a history of having made some good decisions and for a limited amount
of time, maybe an hour or two at the most," Prasad said.The post
Dad arrested after his 6-year-old daughter killed her baby brother by strangling him with a seat belt.
