An 8-year-old boy reportedly died after police said he jumped from an apartment building while attempting to escape his allegedly abusive parents.
The boy, identified only as “Anton,” leaped from the ninth floor of an apartment building in Enerhodar, Ukraine, on Aug. 23, reported the Daily Mail.
After coming home from school that day, his parents were upset that he ripped his clothes and started beating him, the report noted.
A neighbor was quoted by the paper as saying that they heard Anton’s parents shouting at him. Shortly later, the boy fell from a window.
Zhanna, a woman who lives downstairs from the family, said she heard the abuse followed by silence.
“Several seconds passed and there was that horrific thud when a body hits the ground,” she said.
The woman then said, “I looked out of my kitchen window and saw the boy lying below. I called an ambulance and the police.”
The Mail quoted another neighbor, Andrey, as saying: “I saw the family going upstairs to their flat. Ten minutes later the boy was lying on the ground as his parents were racing downstairs in the street.”
Paramedics came and pronounced Anton dead at the scene.
The parents of the boy confessed to beating their son on the day he died. They also admitted to beating the child on a regular basis, according to the report.
The couple, after they were interviewed by police, fled their rented apartment. Officials are now trying to track their whereabouts.
If found guilty, the parents could face as many as five years in prison.
Anton’s school principal, Oksana Zelenska, said the boy was neglected, saying, “His parents were not interested in him at all,” according to the New York Post.
Psychologist Zoya Pershyna insisted that “I did not see it coming.”
Facts About Crime in the United States
Violent crime in the United States has fallen sharply over the past 25 years, according to both the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) and the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) (pdf).
The rate of violent crimes fell by 49 percent between 1993 and 2017, according to the FBI’s UCR, which only reflects crimes reported to the police.
The violent crime rate dropped by 74 percent between 1993 and 2017, according to the BJS’s NCVS, which takes into account both crimes that have been reported to the police and those that have not.
The FBI recently released preliminary data for 2018. According to the Preliminary Semiannual Uniform Crime Report, January to June 2018, violent crime rates in the United States dropped by 4.3 percent compared to the same six-month period in 2017.
While the overall rate of violent crime has seen a steady downward drop since its peak in the 1990s, there have been several upticks that bucked the trend. Between 2014 and 2016, the murder rate increased by more than 20 percent, to 5.4 per 100,000 residents, from 4.4, according to an Epoch Times analysis of FBI data. The last two-year period that the rate soared so quickly was between 1966 and 1968.
