A Texas father has been acquitted of starving his four-year-old son to death, despite gruesome videos showing the boy with protruding bones begging for food.
Brandon Cervera, 31, cried as the jury returned a not guilty verdict for the crime of injuring a child with serious bodily harm in the death of his son Benjamin in 2021, reported KSAT.
Cervera took Benjamin to the emergency room in August 2021. The child 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 found guilty in April and sentenced to 25 years in prison for negligently causing grievous bodily harm to a child.
Heartbreaking video taken on cellphones and surveillance footage shared during Cervera’s trial show the young boy begging for food, searching in cupboards for leftovers and crying while locked in his sparsely furnished room.
Brandon Cervera, 31, was acquitted of starving his four-year-old son to death
Gruesome videos of four-year-old Benjamin with protruding bones begging for food in the months before his death
In one video, just days before the four-year-old child died of starvation, Benjamin asked, “Daddy, daddy, can I have bread?” with his hands folded tightly across his chest as his clothes hung off of him.
Other videos from early 2021 show the little boy rooting through cupboards and the refrigerator in the middle of the night to get food. Benjamin could be seen grabbing fruit snacks, a Jell-O cup, cookies and milk.
Ultimately, prosecutors said Cervera would lock the cabinets, making it harder for Benjamin to steal food.
In a text message conversation with his ex-wife, Cervera allegedly told her, “He doesn’t need to eat” and told his ex to just give the child bread after she told him he had been begging all day.
Cervera’s attorneys said the text message was taken out of context and he told Benjamin not to feed Benjamin because he had already eaten an entire loaf of bread.
Surveillance footage also shows the child crying while trapped in his sparsely furnished room, which he shared with his brother. Police discovered that Benjamin was the only family member without a bed and that he was forced to sleep on a mattress with a urine-soaked blanket.
Brandon Cevera (left) is seen in police bodycam footage standing next to his child in 2021 before he died
During a welfare check (pictured), Benjamin was seen with black eyes and was extremely thin
A medical examiner ruled his cause of death as starvation and said he weighed 28 pounds at the time
Other videos show Benjamin hitting himself in the face in the backseat of a car and Cervera threatening his child as he begged for bread, police said. San Antonio Express News.
The cellphone footage was obtained by police through his stepmother’s device, while the surveillance footage was taken from cameras placed in the apartment, according to Detective Lawrence Saiz of the San Antonio Police Department.
Bexar County Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Kimberley Molina said Benjamin weighed just 28 pounds at the time of his death and had not grown in 10 months.
She also noted that the boy had no body fat and no food was found in the intestinal tract when he died.
Cervera’s lawyers presented experts who argued that Benjamin was not malnourished based on photographs of the boy’s body changes over the last few months of his life.
“This child was always small and that doesn’t mean someone starved,” said attorney Jodi Soyars.