A 6-year-old boy was seen strangely standing outside without anybody noticing what else was there until he was back in the same spot several days later. When one curious man got a closer look at what the kid was doing, he was horrified at what he saw at his feet and acted fast.
In the middle of a 94-degree day in Arizona, outside was no place for a child to be barefoot and standing on the hot pavement, understandably not looking too happy about it. When he was still there hours later and again on a few more occasions, doing the same thing, the sight became incredibly concerning when a stranger saw what else was there.
Mark Simmons and his wife Sarah Simmons are the parents of the boy, but they didn’t really like anything about him or what he did that they apparently disapproved of. Rather than a time out in his bedroom or another typical way to punishing their son, it seemed that there was almost nothing that he could do that was acceptable in their eyes, so they came up with a new way to correct his behavior — through sadistic torture.
According to AZCentral, the Phoenix parents forced the boy to stand outside in the heat, on the scalding pavement, for 10 minutes at a time. As this routine carried on for days, the wounds to his feet continued to get worse, which Sarah would “remedy” by ripping off his blister flaps on the bottom of his feet and making him stand outside again.
When the open sores became grotesquely infected, the boy’s father decided he better take him to the hospital, where physicians saw what was on his feet and quickly called authorities. “It was only when the victim’s wounds became infected and the top of his feet became red that she and Mark decided to call the fire department for medical care,” police wrote.
Sarah told police that she was too afraid to report it sooner for fear that “the children in the house would be taken away,” according to court documents. Her concern became a reality once the truth of her deplorable parenting came out. Now, the parents are behind bars, but what makes it worse is what else went ignored before their arrests.
Prior to the couple being arrested on suspicion of child abuse, Sarah had been the subject of 30 Arizona Department of Child Safety reports. How she was able to accumulate so many cases against her with nothing being done about it is proof that the system cares more about protecting parents than kids. If something was done about it after the second, tenth, or even twentieth visit to Sarah’s home, then this boy wouldn’t have been left standing on scalding hot cement until the skin on his feet burned off.
It shouldn’t have gotten this far for these two to end up behind bars. The only appropriate punishment for what they imposed on their son is to make them stand on burning pavement to correct their bad behavior.
