Queens man sentenced to 10 years in prison for scalding girlfriend's baby with boiling water

Queens man sentenced to 10 years in prison for scalding girlfriend's baby with boiling water

2011-04-29 05:34:57 GMT+7 (ICT)

NEW YORK (BNO NEWS) -- A New York City man was sentenced to 10 years in prison on Thursday for severely burning his girlfriend's infant daughter by deliberately scalding her with boiling water, prosecutors said.

Anthony Parra, 21, of Queens, pleaded guilty last month to one count of first-degree assault before Queens Supreme Court Justice Richard Buchter, who sentenced him to 10 years in prison on Thursday.

The crime happened on May 19, 2010, when Parra was babysitting 11-month-old Raylin Castillo and her two-year-old sister Valerie in his Queens apartment. At around 3 a.m., according to the guilty plea, the baby woke up crying and screaming after which Parra attempted to give her a bottle which she refused.

Parra then took the baby into the shower for about 20 minutes, at which point he left the baby in the shower alone and twice turned up the temperature. He then observed the baby's skin getting red and began scrubbing her with a sponge, after which her skin began to peel off.

Soon after, Parra poured a pan of even hotter water from a faucet onto the child's back while she was on her hands and knees in the shower. Finally, he put cream and alcohol on the baby's burns before taking her to Queen's New York Hospital Medical Center.

The young victim was treated at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center, where medical personnel stated that the burns suffered by Raylin covered approximately 30 percent of her body - the back, the front of her torso, her scalp and her forehead and her upper extremities bilaterally. The burns were second-degree burns and were consistent with having had scalding water poured over the body while the baby was in a crawling position. The child, who was in critical condition following the incident, has suffered permanent scarring.

"The defendant has admitted to severely burning a helpless infant who he was supposed to be caring for in an attempt to stop her from crying," Queens District Attorney Richard Brown said about the shocking case of child abuse. "Today's sentence is necessary to punish the defendant and to serve as a warning to others who would abuse a child."

The mother of the children was at work at the time of the incident.

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