36-year-old Patricia Saintizaire was arrested and charged with first degree murder, aggravated child abuse, and tampering with a witness in the death of her son Bryan Boyer, who she adopted and brought to the United States in April 2023.
The Polk County Sheriff’s Office responded to an Orlando hospital after being alerted that a child died there “under what appeared to be suspicious circumstances.”
The victim was “born in Haiti to a mother who didn’t want him,” Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd said during a press conference Wednesday. In addition to the victim, the suspect is mom to a 16-year-old boy she also adopted from Haiti.
“What we’ve learned during this investigation just turns our stomach,” said Judd, before laying out the details of the case.
The subsequent investigation revealed the boy returned home from school on May 1 “happy and behaving normally, with no injuries,” said authorities, citing school bus cameras and interviews.
“When the victim got home from school, the older brother went to another room for approximately two hours, and did not see or hear what happened to the victim. Patricia then told the brother to bring food to the victim,” reads a press release.
“At that time, he noted that the victim was unable to walk on his own, and struggled to sit up on his own. Patricia told the older brother that the victim was ‘faking it’ and to feed him.
The victim then became unresponsive. The older brother began performing CPR on the child and then told Patricia they needed to take him to the hospital.”
The autopsy alleged showed the victim had old and fresh scarring on his back, a deep liver laceration from blunt force trauma and bruising to his arms and legs, which the medical examiner said were “consistent with ongoing abuse.”
“He’s dead, he’s dead because she beat him to death,” said Judd in a presser, adding that “nothing else other than an immediate hard strike to the abdomen” could have caused a tear in the child’s spleen.
During interviews with police, the suspect allegedly “denied to detectives that she ever used physical discipline as punishment,” while the woman’s husband — who wasn’t home at the time of the incident — said his wife was responsible for discipline.
The boy’s teen brother initially denied being abused, though Judd said he was “was coached to lie to us when we first talked to him.”
