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True Crime SceneGot a recent or past US and Canada crime related news you would like to bring to people's attention? Post it here. If you are lucky, the writers may write it up for the Main Page and possibly...possibly... give you the credit! Make your friends and family jealous! Be sure to read this before posting. If a story in here is also on the Main PagePLEASE update the FP with the info as well. Thanks!
LANCASTER, Pa.—A Connecticut man is being held on charges that he beat and burned his Pennsylvania girlfriend's 18-month-old son while she was at hairdressing school.
Police say 27-year-old Joey Melendez of Plainfield, Conn., has been arraigned on charges including aggravated assault and endangering the welfare of a child. District Judge Maynard Hamilton Jr. has ordered him held in Lancaster County Prison on $150,000 bail. It's not immediately known if he has an attorney.
West Lampeter Township Police Corporal Kirk Bedsole says Melendez is accused of burning the toddler, kneeing him, whipping him with a belt and beating him with a shoe. He says emergency room doctors say the beatings took place over several hours Tuesday night.
Neighbors heard screams and called police. Bedsole says Melendez gave excuses that did not fit with the severity of the injuries.
Joey Herminio Melendez was baby-sitting the toddler, who had bruises, scrapes, bites and other injuries from his head to his small feet, which also looked like they actually had been crushed.
He had an explanation for it all.
Melendez said he accidentally kneed the 18-month-old child in the head when they were hip-hop dancing in their Willow Street apartment, a police officer said today at Melendez's preliminary hearing.
Melendez said he also accidentally hit the child with his belt, while he was wiggling it like a snake, and accidentally stepped on the toddler's foot, while they were going down some steps.
The bites? They were from a "biting game," where he and the toddler "nibbled each other in fun," the officer testified.
Oh, and the child, who was his girlfriend's son, also had gotten into an ashtray and may have had some burns as well, Melendez offered.
Police did not buy it, and charged Melendez, 27, who had just moved here from Connecticut, with aggravated assault, reckless endangerment and child endangerment in October.
After seeing color photos of the child's bruised body and listening to testimony of police, a doctor and a neighbor, Magisterial District Judge Maynard Hamilton ordered Melendez held for trial on the charges.
Police were called to the apartment, at 2713 Willow Street Pike, after a neighbor heard the sounds of banging, yelling, cursing and a child crying, on and off throughout the afternoon and evening of Oct. 28.
Onita Barth said she knew the little boy and his mother, Melissa Lyons, and was relieved when she saw Lyons leaving their apartment parking lot at dinnertime, thinking she "got out of the situation."
She saw a man she did not know, whom she identified as Melendez, outside, in long pants and no shirt at that time.
But after Lyons left, the sounds of a child crying, a man yelling and banging continued off and on throughout the night.
At one point, Barth said, she heard a man yelling, "Shut up! Shut the (expletive) up! She's not coming back."
By 11 p.m., when she still heard the child crying, she decided to call police.
Lyons testified that Melendez had just moved into her apartment that day. Melendez was tired and yelled at her son to be quiet a few times, slamming his hand on the floor, she said.
Lyons left to go to beauty school that night, she testified. Her son only had a small scrape on his head, from falling earlier in the day, she said. When she returned, police officers and ambulance workers were at her apartment.
West Lampeter Township Police Cpl. Andrew Bedsole said he found the child lying unresponsive in his crib when police went into Lyons' apartment.
The child was taken to Lancaster General Hospital's emergency room, where Dr. Michael Reihart examined him.
Reihart said the boy had crush injuries, bruises, bites, scrapes and other marks from his head to his feet, so much so that "to precisely describe each injury was almost impossible."
Reihart said the injuries were not accidental, and noted it was one of the worst cases of child abuse he had seen in his 15 years as a doctor.
Based on testimony at his prelim....I decided to front-page him.
What really made me sick to my stomach is the fact that he had just moved in, THAT DAY! It took him less than 24-hours to get pissed off enough to hurt that baby. Asshole.
__________________ Keep your friends close. And your enemies........under the floorboards.
That very same day?!? Why would she leave a toddler alone for hours with a man that has never spent any real time with him the day he shows up?! And there were signs earlier in the day he was short tempered with the baby in her presence? I don't care how well you think you know someone from the virtual world... People don't necessarily take time to project their most grevious shortcomings, ya know? This baby's torture shouldn't have needed to serve as his mama's object lesson in using better real life judgement rather than projections of love to make good decisions.
The Following User Says Thank You to Castille For This Useful Post:
October 31st, 2008, 02:52 PM
Joey Melendez is another baby beating penis
Hybrid Mode
