A 41-year-old California barber allegedly became so enraged after the 6-year-old child he was babysitting peed his pants at the park that he tortured and beat the boy to death with a “large piece of raw lumber.”
Ernest Lamar Love is facing murder, torture and child abuse charges in the death of Chance Crawford in Placentia, about 35 miles southeast of Los Angeles. According to the Orange County District Attorney’s Office, Chance’s mother dropped him off at Love’s barbershop around 6:30 p.m. on Aug. 29 before her overnight shift as a nurse’s assistant at St. Joseph’s Hospital.
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About seven hours later, Love reportedly brought a beaten and barely-breathing Chance to Children’s Hospital of Orange County.
“Doctors at CHOC discovered that much of Chance’s flesh was missing from his buttocks, leaving raw, gaping wounds, along with subdural hematoma, extreme brain swelling, and other injuries consistent with violent shaking,” prosecutors said in a press release.