A father snapped his two month-old son’s ribs after squeezing the baby in a bid to get him to stop crying, it is claimed.
Brendan Peavler, 20, reportedly broke four of the infant’s bones at his home in Duncan, Oklahoma in August, and was charged with child abuse last week.
He reportedly told cops that he had ‘squeezed’ his son ‘tight,’ according to The Duncan Banner.
Peavler added that when the crying didn’t stop ‘he had squeezed (the child) approximately five times’ around a week before the boy was take to hospital.
The alleged child abuser is also said to have admitted he didn’t tell anyone that he’d squeezed his son, or that he might have injured the infant.
Police were called to a hospital in Duncan in late August after the boy was admitted with broken ribs doctors thought ‘were consistent with child abuse.’
The little boy had been taken to hospital by his mother Jewels Harmon, with the woman telling doctors she was concerned about her baby son’s cough.
She appears to have split with Peavler in the wake of the claims, and made multiple cryptic Facebook posts around the time of the baby’s admission to hospital.
One said: ‘Someone please tell me how you can know someone so well & then it turns out you don’t fucking know them at All.!!’
In another, Harman implied she was having nightmares about the abuse inflicted on her son, writing: ‘Woke up and felt like I was suffocating like my ribs were broke and I couldn’t do anything about it…. ‘I just cried.
I can’t even Imagine.’ Peavler was questioned by detectives, and initially claimed he had injured his son after accidentally dropping him.
He is then said to have changed his story, telling cops that he may ‘have hugged (the child) too tight but that was all’.
During a follow-up interview on October 1, Peavler is said to have elaborated and claimed that he hurt the baby when he refused to stop crying, before telling the story about squeezing the child five times.
Peavler is being held in jail in lieu of $200,000 bond and will appear before a court on December 11.
