The horror show in Colorado just gets more sickening all the time. Custodial father (and stepdad) AARON THOMPSON is on trial for the murder of his "missing" daughter, Aarone Thompson, who hasn't been seen since at least 2005. Now the stepson has testified, and it just makes you want to puke. What this poor child had to put up with in that "family", what all those kids had to put up with....
http://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/20566459/detail.html
Boy: Thompson Held Child By Feet Over Toilet
Child With Diagnosed Problem Shamed And Beaten For It
Tyler Lopez, 7NEWS Reporter
POSTED: 11:10 am MDT August 26, 2009
UPDATED: 11:39 am MDT August 26, 2009
CENTENNIAL, Colo. -- Another child on Wednesday calmly named defendant Aaron Thompson as one of two adults that made their Aurora home a torture chamber for seven kids.
The 12-year-old reiterated what the jury has heard before, from other kids in the home. The boy said they were beaten with belts, a triple-layer coaxial television cable and a bat.
Sometimes, the kids were tied up to the pole in the basement while they were beaten, and forced to stand on the bricks of the fireplace with dumbbells in their hands for hours on end.
Sometimes, they would stand there for one day or "two days."
The boy's stepfather, Aaron Thompson, is currently on trial, facing 60 charges, many of them relating to child abuse. Thompson's live-in girlfriend and the mother of five of the children in the home, died in 2006, before she was arrested.
The boy was asked about the cause of the beatings.
"I took something from the kitchen. It was this little ... snack thing. It was in the cupboard," the 12-year-old said. "Because it was Shely's."
By this point the jury already knew the kids had different, "generic" food while Lowe and Thompson ate the name brand items.
The boy is the third of seven surviving kids to testify in person this week. The first girl, on Monday, was clearly the strongest, refusing to cry or let any emotions show through. The second girl, who testified on Tuesday, is clearly improving, speaking clearer but still dealing with what a social worker called "developmentally delayed" growth.
But there was something different about the way this boy, the first male, who rarely looked up, spoke in a very soft but audible voice, and answered every question prosecutor Bob Chappell asked of him.
Like whether "Big A" Thompson would hold the boy up by his feet, dangling the child over the toilet to tell him, "This is where the poop goes."
"Yes," the boy said.
On Tuesday, a social worker told the jury this boy suffers from encopresis, an inability to control bowel movements.
Police found several pairs of boy's underwear, soiled and wrapped in plastic grocery bags when they searched the Aurora home in 2005, searching for Aarone Thompson, a girl in the home who was reported missing.
The soiled underwear would frequently earn the boy, who was eight at the time this case came to police, excruciating pain, sometimes on "the pole in the basement," he said.
"We would get tied down to it and get beaten by the belt or the extension cord on the back," the boy said. "It happened all the time."
But they weren't whipped with an extension cord from the hardware store. This was a collection of three coaxial cables wrapped tightly together, with metal tips on the end. In court, the boy identify several scars on his body from the cord.
The jury saw the photos on his back, which showed five scars; his left hamstring, where there was a 2-inch vertical mark; and his right calf, left knee, and his left forearm.
The boy said the scars came "from the point of the extension cord."
TheDenverChannel is not identifying the boy, nor any of his siblings, because they could be victims of abuse.
While quiet, the boy would also make powerful statements through his artwork. The jury saw a very small drawing the boy had added to one wall of the unpainted garage at 16551 East Kepner Place. It was no bigger than 4 inches around and appeared, from the back of the room, to be a dragon's head.
He was beaten for it, he said, by Lowe but also said, "He (Thompson) held me down on the couch."
The 7th grader, who now lives with several brothers and sisters in a foster home on a “small farm”, also depicted the way the kids were being beaten, including “blood dripping from my sister”.
He would say that drawing referred to Aarone Thompson, reported missing on November 14, 2005 but never found.
The witness testified he saw Aarone with blood dripping from her body as she was getting beaten in the basement by both Aaron and Shely with “the extension cord.”
Chappell found that one of the children in the drawing was the boy himself.
"What's he saying?" Chappell asked.
"I'm sorry," the boy said.
"When you were getting hit with the belt by Big A, were you saying you were sorry?" Chappell followed.
"Yes," the boy said.
"Did that make it stop?" the prosecutor asked.
"No," the child answered.
He recalled seeing the metal buckle on the belt, admitted as evidence in the trial, fly off as Aaron used it on another child in the basement. Besides eating the wrong food, the reasons form the beatings included "run(ning) around the house making noise, playing, (a bad) report card , potty accidents, and one boy who 'left his clothes on the basement floor ... (he was) supposed to pick them up."