Troubling Questions Remain after Toddler Beating Death

By Anastacia Mott Austin

Two primary questions plague the minds of those reading of the terrible beating death of a toddler boy by his father this week: why (and how) could someone do that to his own son? And why couldn’t anyone stop him?

The details are more than troubling, they are deeply upsetting. No one knows why 27-year-old Sergio Aguiar, who had no previous trouble with the law and no history of mental illness, would decide to stop on a dark road, grab his young son out of his carseat, and savagely beat him to death.

One also can’t help but wonder, why couldn’t the many bystanders who stopped and witnessed the horrific killing stop one man?

The case has caused many of us to ask these questions.

The story began when drivers on a lonely stretch of road near Turlock, California, spotted a pickup truck stopped in the middle of the road, facing the wrong way. A couple driving past initially thought that Aguilar, who was in the middle of the road, was "kicking garbage or something." But when they turned around to investigate, they saw that he was kicking and punching a very young toddler.

Other witness reports state that they saw Aguilar swing the boy up and slam him onto the road before beating and kicking him.

The couple who thought the man was kicking garbage were suspicious and turned around, shining their headlights onto Aguilar. "Sure enough," said Deborah McKain to reporters at The San Francisco Chronicle, "He was kicking a baby around."

McKain’s boyfriend, Dan Robinson, is a volunteer fire chief in the nearby town of Crow’s Landing. The couple pulled up to the scene and Robinson showed Aguiar his badge and told him to stop.

Aguiar reportedly told Robinson, "It’s just trash." He also told the man that the baby had demons in him that had to be gotten out. "There was a total hollowness in his eyes, like I could see right through to the back of his head," said Robinson to reporters.

Various news media outlets have reported that Robinson, as well as several other witnesses at the scene, tried to stop Aguiar. But he apparently was able to shake them off and continue beating the helpless baby.

Many of the bystanders called 911, and a police helicopter that was patrolling the area was able to locate the scene before any patrol cars on the ground. After viewing the horrific attack with the spotlight, the helicopter made an emergency landing in a nearby field, and an officer in the helicopter jumped to the ground before it had landed.

Officer Jerry Raymar ran to the scene but was prevented from getting close by a fence with barbed wire. He ordered Aguiar to stop immediately, and when the man continued the attack, the officer shot and killed him.

The baby was rushed to a local hospital, where he was pronounced dead. Rescue workers performed CPR on him at the scene, but in all likelihood it was long past too late by then. At this time the baby can only be presumed to be Aguiar’s son, because the savage beating rendered him unrecognizable. DNA testing will need to be performed to confirm the child’s identity.

A toxicology report will be available in several weeks, and experts say that the presence of methamphetamine or hallucinogenic drugs might explain the man’s deranged behavior.

But even Robinson says that Aguiar was not acting crazed, and was remarkably calm, even stopping the attack at one point to help Robinson find the hazard lights in his pickup before returning to kick and beat his son again.

This fact has troubled many readers, who wonder why nobody at the scene was able to successfully intervene, or even take the toddler into their car when Aguiar had paused in his beating.

Deborah McKain, one of the first people to arrive at the scene, told reporters that she witnessed Aguiar kick, hit, or punch the toddler "at least 100 times" during the seven minutes she watched.

She told the press that all of the bystanders were "forcefully urging" Aguiar to stop, and at one point Robinson rushed him but was shoved out of the way.

McKain says that no one tried to stop the attack because they weren’t sure how dangerous he was, that "maybe he had something in his pocket."

This sounds unbelievable to some, who insist they would have intervened immediately.

"It's an aspiration," said John Darley, a psychology professor at Princeton University who has studied bystander reactions in emergencies. "They hope they would have done differently," says Darley of people who say they would have jumped right in.

McKain herself says, "It was like I was on some type of drug or something. I couldn't believe what was going on. It was like a dream."

This type of reaction is common, say psychology experts, who say that the people witnessing the attack were likely suffering from shock themselves.

Until you’ve had an experience like that, say the experts, you can’t say how you might react, as much as you might like to think you’d have saved the little boy.

"[They] never know until they're in that situation," echoes Deborah McKain, who says she’ll never get the images of that night out of her mind.

Still, it’s extremely troubling to think that more than seven adults witnessed the seven-minute beating death of an innocent toddler without being capable of doing something, anything, to try to save him.