Chance Crawford was a happy 6-year-old boy who loved “Sesame Street” and “Mickey Mouse Clubhouse.” The first-grader’s drawings of the Disney mascot were so detailed, his family swears they looked like they were straight out of a movie.
Chance died Tuesday, days after prosecutors alleged his babysitter tortured and brutally beat him with a piece of wood.
“Why did this happen to him? He didn’t get to live the rest of his life,” Chance’s father, Vance Crawford, told KABC-TV. “He lived a happy life. He was great. He was a great kid. I love my son. I miss him so much. He didn’t deserve this.”
The man who authorities say was guarding the boy, Ernest Lamar Love, 41, was charged this week with murder, torture and child abuse resulting in death, all felonies. He has pleaded not guilty and is being held without bail.
On the evening of Aug. 29, after his third day of freshman year, prosecutors say Chance was dropped off at Love’s Placentia hair salon while his mother left for a night shift as a nursing assistant at St. Joseph’s Hospital.
Authorities say Love took Chance to a local park, where the boy wet himself. Later, surveillance video showed Chance following Love, who was carrying a large piece of rough lumber, into the barbershop, prosecutors said.
Once inside, prosecutors say Love beat the boy with wood and poured hydrogen peroxide on the wounds. He then forced the injured boy to do push-ups, sit-ups and jumping jacks, prosecutors said.
“Words fail to describe the absolute terror this little boy was forced to endure, all at the hands of someone who was supposed to protect him, not torture him to death,” Orange County District Attorney Todd Spitzer said in a statement.
Love’s attorney could not immediately be reached for comment Thursday.
Early Friday morning, prosecutors said, Love drove the boy to the emergency room at Children’s Hospital of Orange County. At 1:30 a.m., Love allegedly carried the boy, who was unconscious and having trouble breathing, to the hospital.
Doctors found missing flesh and “open, gaping wounds” on the boy’s buttocks, as well as extreme brain swelling and other injuries consistent with violent shaking, prosecutors said.
Four days after arriving at the hospital, Chance died.
In a GoFundMe campaign launched to cover the boy’s funeral costs, family members wrote that Chance was “always happy, always kind and always polite.”
“Chance lit up every room he entered,” his family wrote. “He was intelligent, curious and a great artist. He was a gifted child and had so much life to live.”
If convicted, Love faces a maximum sentence of 32 years to life in prison.
California Daily Newspapers
