In April 2009, a soldier beat an eight-year-old boy so severely that his intestines burst. The child is hooked up to a machine that feeds him nutrients and collects his waste. All this over a deleted Grand Theft Auto IV game file.
“We originally got the call form the hospital that a child had fallen off a bed and sustained some internal injuries,” Capt Will Hines of Oklahoma’s Lawton Police Department told local news outlet KSWO in 2009.
Once police discovered how serious the boy’s injuries were, they began to press his mother and her boyfriend Rocky Donadio, then a soldier at Fort Sill. The story then changed from the child falling off the bed to wrestling with his brothers and another one of the kids jumping off the bed onto his stomach.
“The problem we had is the victim in this case was incoherent for the longest time, detectives could not interview him to ask him what had happened, the other siblings were obviously scared, didn’t know what to do,” Capt Hines said at the time.
Donadio was charged with child abuse, and yesterday it took the jury only 30 minutes to find him guilty of child abuse, KSWO reports. A source close to the case tells Kotaku that Donadio punched, kicked and then stomped on the boy’s stomach because the child deleted Donadio’s Grand Theft Auto IV save file.
The abuse was so servere, the source says, that the boy’s intestines burst. He underwent over 60 surgeries that removed most of his digestive tract and pancreas, and he is currently hooked up to a machine that feeds him nutrients as well as disposes of his waste.
Donadio was sentenced to 75 years in prison and must serve at least 85 per cent of that before being eligible for parole.
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