Florida Father Who Killed His 7-week-old Baby Was Convicted

2024 Author: Steven Freeman | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 08:15

A Florida father who beat his 7-week-old son and suffocated him with baby wipes was sentenced to 45 years in prison after pleading guilty to the boy's death.

The conviction was imposed on Joseph Walsh after he declined to dispute the charges of second-degree murder and aggravated child abuse against his son Chance Walsh.

According to the prosecution, Walsh and his wife Kristen Bury killed the boy and left the little body to decompose in a crib for a week.

"You beat and brutalized an innocent boy who couldn't protect himself," Bury's mother and the boy's grandmother, Sally Susina, told Walsh in court, according to NBC. “You are an abomination of humanity. You deserve something much worse than this."

The boy's body was found a month after he disappeared in September 2015. According to The Bradenton Herald newspaper, authorities say Walsh hit Chance and choked him with baby wipes, or wet wipes, to death.

After Bury complained about the smell given off by the boy's body, they decided to bury him in a wooded area near the house, and then leave the state and start a new life.

It was the boy's grandmother who called authorities to report that she had not seen her grandson since September 9, 2015 and was concerned for his well-being after his parents told him conflicting stories about his whereabouts.

Following that call, investigators tracked the couple's movements and inspected their home, where they found blood stains on the walls, while police dogs reported the presence of human remains in the area.

Upon evidence, the boy's mother accepted the boy had been killed, and the couple were arrested and charged with child neglect and first-degree murder. After the arrest, Bury was found dead in prison from an apparent suicide.

With Bury's death, prosecutors lost their only eyewitness, and images from a video showing Walsh's treatment of the boy were inadmissible. In the end, the defense and the prosecution reached an agreement whereby the accused did not dispute the charges in exchange for a 45-year sentence.

"We are convinced that justice will be better served with this long prison term," prosecutors Suzanne O'Donnell and Craig Schaeffer said in a statement obtained by the Herald. "Joseph Walsh will probably die in prison."

The couple lost another boy in the past just two weeks old, allegedly due to a kidney infection that was caused by circumcision.