An Missouri mother will spend the next few years in prison because she abused and neglected her two young children so badly that one of them was called a “victim of torture.”
Two counts of child abuse and neglect were found guilty by Alyssa Nicole Bowman, 29, on Friday morning in Greene County.
At first, she was charged with several more crimes, but in exchange for her plea, the prosecutors dropped four more counts of child abuse and neglect and two counts of child endangerment.
Greene County Judge Jerry Harmison quickly told Bowman that he would be going to state prison for nine years.
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A relative brought a “visibly malnourished and visibly injured” 2-year-old boy to Mercy Hospital in Springfield in May, according to a probable cause statement that the Springfield Daily Citizen obtained. That’s when the defendant and her 30-year-old husband Joshua Bowman were arrested.
People who work for the police say the boy had cuts and bruises all over his body, but the worst ones were on his forehead. Police said the child also looked like it wasn’t getting enough food.
In the probable cause statement, an officer wrote, “I saw Victim 1 and thought he looked so malnourished that I immediately thought of pictures of people who had died in concentration camps.”
Police saw that the boy the officer was talking about had loose skin and almost no fat on his body.
The relative who took the boy to the hospital said they hadn’t seen the child in a long time. The parents must have left the child with the relative in late March, which is why the boy went to the emergency room almost right away.
After that, the police and the Greene County Children’s Division went to the Bowman home.
According to the probable cause statement, the police found things to be “unkempt” and that there was a “foul odor” all the time. Some food scraps and what looked like feces were found in the area where the boy slept, according to police.
Things didn’t get much better for the older child.
A detective talked to the boy’s sister a few days after the hospital stay. She told the police that for a few weeks, when she burped, it didn’t “taste good,” but her parents told her to “ignore it.”
The adults in her life were also “mean” to her, she said. In the probable cause statement, police wrote that they sometimes wouldn’t let her eat for “one day.”
According to the police, the girl said the Bowmans gave her and her brother “all the good stuff” and were “rude” by not giving them food or water often.
A report from the Daily Citizen says that at the plea hearing, Prosecuting Attorney Elizabeth Fax told the court that the boy weighed only 20 pounds on the day he was saved from his terrible situation.
The child had an acute kidney injury, developmental delays related to being abused, a developmental nonverbal disorder, and was not thriving, the prosecutor said.
Fax told the judge, “He was also diagnosed as having been tortured.”
After five years of serving her sentence, the defendant will be able to get parole.
In December, there will be a hearing for Joshua Bowman.
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