A Texas father has been acquitted of the starvation death of his four-year-old son despite horrifying videos showing the child with protruding bones begging for food.
Brandon Cervera, 31, sobbed as the jury returned a not guilty verdict for battery of a child with serious bodily injury in the death of his son Benjamin in 2021, reported KSAT.
Cervera took Benjamin to the emergency room in August 2021. The boy was unconscious, covered in bruises that were in various states of healing, and appeared extremely emaciated. He died shortly after arriving at the hospital.
The boy’s stepmother, Miranda Casarez, 25, was convicted in April and 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 man begging for food, rummaging through cabinets for leftovers and crying while trapped in his sparsely furnished room.
Brandon Cervera, 31, was acquitted of the starvation death of his four-year-old son
Horrifying videos show four-year-old Benjamín, with protruding bones, begging for food in the months before his death.
A video taken just days before the four-year-old starved to death showed Benjamin asking: “Dad, dad, can I have bread?” with his hands tightly crossed in front of his chest as his clothes hung off of him.
Other videos from early 2021 show the boy rummaging through cabinets and the refrigerator for food in the middle of the night. Benjamin could be seen eating fruit snacks, a cup of Jell-O, cookies and milk.
Finally, prosecutors said Cervera would lock the cabinets, making it difficult for Benjamin to steal food.
In a text message exchange with his ex-wife, Cervera allegedly told her, “He doesn’t need dinner” and told his ex to just give the boy 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 Benjamín dinner because he had already eaten an entire loaf of bread.
Surveillance footage also shows the crying boy trapped in his sparsely furnished room, which he shared with his brother. The police discovered that Benjamin was the only member of the family who did not have a bed and was forced to sleep on a mattress with a urine-soaked blanket.
Brandon Cevera (left) appears in police body camera footage with his son in 2021 before he dies.
During a welfare check (pictured), Benjamín was seen with black eyes and extremely thin.
A medical examiner ruled his cause of death as starvation and said he weighed 28 pounds at the time.
Other videos show Benjamín punching himself in the face in the back seat of a car and Cervera threatening his son while he asked for bread, according to the newspaper. San Antonio Express-News.
Police obtained cellphone footage from his stepmother’s device, while surveillance footage was taken from cameras located inside the apartment, according to Detective Lawrence Saiz of the San Antonio Police Department.
Bexar County Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Kimberley Molina said Benjamin only weighed 28 pounds at the time of his death and had not grown in 10 months.
He also noted that the child had no body fat and that no food was found in the intestinal tract when he died.
Cervera’s attorneys presented experts who asserted that Benjamin was not malnourished based on photographs of the boy’s bodily changes during the final months of his life.
“This child was always small and that doesn’t mean someone is starving,” said defense attorney Jodi Soyars.
