The 10-year-old boy was made to hold weights above his head. He was whipped and struck with fists and objects for hours. His beatings were so brutal that his organs were detached and floating in his abdominal cavity.
On Friday, prosecutors with the Manhattan district attorney’s office read off a grim litany of abuse that they said the boy, Ayden Wolfe, had suffered at a sentencing for the man who killed him.
The defendant, Ryan Cato, got 25 years to life for second-degree murder.
“There are no words to adequately describe the disgust I feel, that everyone feels,” the judge, Curtis Farber, told Mr. Cato, who was convicted last month.
“I have come to the conclusion here, for that which you have done, you simply deserve no mercy,” Judge Farber said.
Mr. Cato had been living with Ayden in a Harlem apartment for only a few months before the boy’s death. He began dating the boy’s mother at the peak of the coronavirus pandemic, when New York City’s schools were closed and students were learning remotely. In those months, Mr. Cato routinely beat the boy, prosecutors said, eventually killing him in a 24-hour episode of torture in March 2021.
As prosecutors and the judge detailed how Ayden was found with cuts, lacerations and bruises all over his body, people in the gallery quietly sobbed.
The boy’s mother, Aquisha Johnson, has pleaded guilty to manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide and testified against her former boyfriend. She is to be sentenced on June 3.
On Friday, Ms. Johnson — who was denied the chance to read a victim impact statement — briefly entered the courtroom before rushing out crying as a prosecutor recounted how her son had been killed.
On March 5, 2021, the police arrived at Ayden’s apartment after a caller reported hearing banging and screaming coming from inside. The caller heard a man say, “Do you want me to beat your ass, too?” and a woman plead “stop,” according to a complaint. The person also heard soft moaning, the complaint said. The commotion lasted about 40 minutes.
The officers who responded left after 12 minutes when no one answered the door.
The next day, after Ms. Johnson called the police, emergency responders arrived at the apartment to find Ayden lying on the floor naked and unconscious with cuts and bruises, prosecutors said. He had puncture wounds, lacerations and “extensive bruising to his face and extremities,” the police said at that time. He was pronounced dead at a hospital two hours later.
The city medical examiner later determined that Ayden had died from battered child syndrome. The doctor found that he had broken ribs and a lacerated spleen, liver, kidney and renal vein. The injuries, according to the examination, were recent.
“While today’s sentencing will not bring back this innocent child, I hope it gives his loved ones a sense of comfort and closure in this abhorrent crime,” Alvin L. Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, said in a statement after Mr. Cato’s sentencing.
Mr. Cato has maintained his innocence and will appeal, said his lawyer, Jessica Horani.
“He was only there for a matter of months,” she told the court. “And I believe the conviction in this case is a total aberration in the history of his life.”
In court, Mr. Cato thanked his family for their support.
Ayden’s abuse, prosecutors said, was part of a spike in domestic violence during the pandemic, as shutdowns penned families inside. The lockdown forced people into isolated environments with abusers and made it difficult to ask for help from teachers, social workers and other professionals.
Families lacked “access to the resources that they had before to help manage regular mental health issues or frustration,” said Kristina Coleman, who oversees the child advocacy and mental health programs at Safe Horizon, a domestic-violence shelter provider and America’s largest victims’ services agency.
Ms. Johnson described her son as intelligent, but also mischievous. Ayden “did things that was bad, but he was not a bad child,” she testified.
To discipline him when he misbehaved, she said she would hit him with a belt on his backside or make him hold weights, she said.
As the school shutdown continued through 2020 and into 2021, oscillating between partial openings and fully remote periods, Ayden and his mother were joined in their apartment by her new boyfriend, Mr. Cato.
Mr. Cato’s abuse of Ayden started shortly after, prosecutors said.
He would film himself abusing Ayden, they said, and bragged to friends about what he was doing to the boy. He eventually beat him to death, they said.
Ayden’s father, Darnell Wolfe, who was incarcerated at the time of his son’s killing, said in a statement read by a prosecutor that his son’s life had been “everything.”
Ayden, Mr. Wolfe said, “had a future, which he has no more.”
Hurubie Meko is a Times reporter covering criminal justice in New York, with a focus on the Manhattan district attorney’s office and state courts.
The post Man Convicted of Fatally Torturing Child May Spend Life in Prison appeared first on New York Times.
