A 23-year-old Texas man is being charged with beating a 2-year-old to death after the child wiped feces on him, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reports
Arturo Santiago Pena-Almanza Jr. was initially arrested Wednesday and charged with abandoning or endangering a child, but authorities determined that the death was not accidental and that Pena-Alamanza hit him several times.
He is now being charged with capital murder of a person under 10. The child was 2-year-old Jeremiah Degrate Rios, the son of a woman Pena-Almanza Jr. was seeing. The three lived in the Irving home where the body was found, after police responded to a report of an unconscious person Tuesday morning.
Pena-Almanza confessed to killing the boy to detectives, sharing that he did so after the boy wiped feces from his diaper onto him. An autopsy reveals that the boy suffered multiple blunt force injuries to his head.
“I asked him why didn’t he wake me up when my son asked him if he could go outside,” mother Rosa Maria Selenna Rios Martinez told WFAA in the video above, explaining that the two went to a car in the early morning to get a charger. “He said because I was asleep and he didn’t want to wake me up.”
Jeremiah would have turned 3-years-old on Nov. 13.
