Arizona teen, 16, left to babysit three kids accused of killing boy

A 16-year-old boy left in charge of babysitting three children, including an infant, is accused of beating the oldest, a 5-year-old boy, to death.

Police in Phoenix say Justin Hoskins, the son of the mother's live-in boyfriend, was left to care for the three children Sunday when he violently lost control, KTVK reported.

The 5-year-old reportedly got into a food fight with his 3-year-old sister during feeding time with their 4-month-old sister, and refused to stand in a corner as punishment.

That stubborn refusal allegedly led to Hoskins shoving the boy in the chest, causing him to lose his balance and hit his head on the floor.

Hoskins, though seeing that the boy was unresponsive, picked the boy up and put him to bed.

“When I read a line like that, my first thought is that the “mother” needs to spend the rest of her life in prison.”

Ayup. One of the uncomfortable truths that few people are ever willing to acknowledge is that women will, depressingly often, stand aside and watch as a new suitor abuses or kills her children from a prior father.

It’s a constant of nature, sadly. Females of many species will let a new male walk up and kill the offspring of the prior male. You see it in lions, hell you see it with horses for the love of god. You could view it as slightly biologically adaptive behavior, why risk losing the resources or protection of a new mate by protecting the offspring of a prior mate that wasn’t even able to keep his female and defend his offspring? Law of the jungle, flush away the genetic material from the looser and let the bigger jerk have a go at it, nice kitties don’t get the antelope.

Yet when it happens with humans we bend over backwards making excuses for the woman, we’ll say things like “the most dangerous thing in the world to a young child is mommy’s new boyfriend” like the woman couldn’t have possibly been the other half of the equation and couldn’t have been just as guilty as the man beating a kid to death. Or in this case, the teenage son of mommy’s new boyfriend.

The simple fact of the matter is that for quite a lot of shallow, soulless women, an ***hole boyfriend is going to be worth more to them than the happiness or even the safety of the children from a prior relationship. Worse yet, if you ever spend any significant time around the type of broken, useless people that behave like this, you’ll find that the more of a raging piece of crap the new boyfriend is, paradoxically the more likely a woman will be to actually let him abuse the children.

...lack of strong moral upbringing as well.

IMO that causes many of the problems we see today with young people. Often their family situation, their home life, messes them up. I'd don't know how I would have ended up without two loving, stable and watchful parents, along with an attentive family around me.

We know very little about this young boy's life but his father had a girlfriend who isn't his mother. Obviously the boy was not mature enough to babysit her children and he should not have been given that responsibility. The whole story is very sad.

Blame the adults.

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