A Texas father has been acquitted in the starvation death of his four-year-old son despite horrifying videos showing the boy with protruding bones begging for food.
Brandon Cervera, 31, sobbed as the jury returned a not guilty verdict for the crime of injury to a child with serious bodily injury in the 2021 death of his son Benjamin, reported KSAT.
Cervera took Benjamin to the emergency room in August 2021. The child was unconscious, covered in bruises that were at various states of healing and appeared to be extremely emaciated. He died shortly after his arrival at the hospital.
The boy’s stepmother, Miranda Casarez, 25, was found guilty in April and was sentenced to 25 years in prison for injury to a child by omission causing serious bodily injury.
Heartbreaking video captured on cellphone and surveillance footage shared during Cervera’s trial showed the young boy begging for food, rooting through cabinets for scraps and crying while trapped in his sparsely furnished room.
Brandon Cervera, 31, was acquitted in the starvation death of his four-year-old son
Horrifying videos showing four-year-old Benjamin with protruding bones begging for food in the months before his death
One video take just days before the four-year-old died of starvation showed Benjamin asking ‘Dad, dad, can I have bread?’ with his hands tightly folded in front of his chest as his clothes hung off of him.
Other videos from early 2021 show the small boy rooting through cabinets and the fridge to get food in the middle of the night. Benjamin could be seen grabbing fruit snacks, a Jell-O cup, cookies, and milk.
Eventually, prosecutors said Cervera would lock the cabinets, making it harder for Benjamin to steal food.
In a text exchange with his ex-wife, Cervera allegedly told her: ‘He don’t need to eat dinner’ and told his ex to just give the child bread after she told him he had been begging all day.
Cervera’s lawyers said that text message was taken out of context and he said not to give Benjamin dinner because he had already eaten a whole loaf of bread.
Surveillance footage also shows the child crying while trapped in his sparsely furnished room, which he shared with his brother. Police found Benjamin was the only family member who did not have a bed and he was forced to sleep on a mattress with a urine-soaked blanket.
Brandon Cevera (left), is seen in police bodycam footage standing next to his child in 2021 before he died
During a welfare check (pictured), Benjamin was seen with black eyes and was extremely skinny
His cause of death was ruled starvation by a medical examiner and said he weighed 28 pounds at the time
Other videos show Benjamin punching himself in the face in the backseat of a car and Cervera threatening his child while he begged for bread, according to the San Antonio Express-News.
The cellphone footage was obtained by police off his stepmother’s device, while the surveillance footage was taken from cameras placed inside the apartment, according to Detective Lawrence Saiz of the San Antonio Police Department.
The Bexar County Chief Medical Examiner, Dr. Kimberley Molina, said Benjamin only weighed 28 pounds at the time of his death and hadn’t grown in 10 months.
She also noted the boy had no body fat and no food was found in the intestinal tract when he died.
Cervera’s attorneys brought out experts that claimed Benjamin was not malnourished based on photos of the boy’s body changes during the last few months of his life.
‘This child was always small and that does not make someone starved,’ defense attorney Jodi Soyars said.
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