LITTLE ROCK — Barely 2 years old, Freddy Bradford survived torture, a Pulaski County circuit judge said in sending a Little Rock man to prison Thursday for abusing the boy while warning the toddler’s mother that she would join him if she violates her probation.
Judge Wendell Griffen was plain-spoken in his distaste for the sentence granted in October 2009 to 20-year-old Brittany Ray Bradford - five years on probation, a $500 fine and four months in jail. “The court does not like it,” he said.
But he rejected the argument that leniency for Bradford - an agreement worked out by different lawyers before a different judge - meant that her former boyfriend, 24-yearold Brandon Marquis Bellows, deserved similar consideration for injuries that cost the boy his gallbladder. He ordered Bellows to serve 10 years in prison, with five years suspended, after the 24-yearold pleaded no contest to a first-degree domestic-battery charge. Bellows faced a maximum sentence of 20 years.
“‘I shouldn’t go to jail because she didn’t go to jail,’ that’s basically the argument,” Griffen said, calling the proposition “unacceptable.”
“It is the court’s belief Ms. Bradford and Mr. Bellows are both responsible for the serious injuries Freddy has sustained,” Griffen said. “The court’s concern is what is justice for Freddy. It is not whether Ms. Bradford [had a rough life] or whether Mr. Bradford is a good student, but about what Freddy has experienced.”
Bellows admitted to occasionally spanking the toddler, once using an extension cord until the boy cried, but denied inflicting any of the serious injuries. His wrongdoing, he said, was in not speaking up sooner on the boy’s behalf.
Bellows begged the judge for probation, saying he had turned his life around and was going to college to be a radiology technician.
“A lot could have been avoided if I’d spoken up sooner,” he testified. “I am absolutely not responsible for his internal injuries. I’m not going to say I’m completely innocent, because I did spank the child.”
Bradford and Bellows were arrested in August 2008 after employees at the Harvest Foods grocery store on Rodney Parham Road called police after seeing the toddler with them had black eyes, hidden under dark glasses, and a substantial knot on his head. The couple left, but police traced them to nearby apartments where the couple and the boy lived with Bellows’ mother, Carla Rucker.
Alarmed by the boy’s injuries, the police took him to Arkansas Children’s Hospital, where doctors documented a host of bruises, deputy prosecutor Emily Abbott told the judge. Among them were 41 marks, some of them fingertipsized, numerous “whip marks” on his back and buttocks, and a large, blood-filled bruise on his head. After he suddenly got sick while eating, according tomedical testimony, doctors realized his gallbladder had been subjected to so much force it had ripped free from his liver, a condition that likely caused him serious pain.
Thursday’s hearing pitted Bradford, who had pleaded guilty to second-degree battery and permitting child abuse, against Griffen, who was dubious about her claim that she didn’t realize the extent of Freddy’s injuries sooner because she was sick. Her illness kept her from bathing, changing or handling her son in the week before his injuries were discovered, she told the judge. Those duties were carried out by Bellows, her boyfriend of four months, and his mother, an Arkansas Department of Human Services employee.
Defense attorney Latonya Austin repeatedly pointed to Bradford’s admission to police that she spanked her son an average of five times a day. On the witness stand, Bradford said she had never hit her son hard enough to mark him, but she acknowledged spanking him the day before the arrest.
Freddy has recovered, appears to have no memory of the abuse and has become a caring older brother to a baby sister, his aunt and adoptive mother testified.
Northwest Arkansas, Pages 10 on 02/21/2011