In police interviews, father of dead child changes story about discipline methods

In an initial interview with police the morning of his toddler’s death, 23-year-old Justin Tom Bennett said he never hit his kids.

When the three girls misbehaved, he placed them in the corner, swatted their butts, didn’t let them watch TV or didn’t let them cuddle with their grandmother.

The “punishment fits the crime,” he told Henderson police about 11 a.m. July 1.

Later that day, after his 3-year-old daughter Abygaile died with fluid in her lungs and bruising around her eyes, above her left ear and on her chest and lower back, before he was arrested and charged with murder in connection with her death, Bennett’s story changed.

The coroner’s office ruled Abygaile’s death a homicide and Bennett was arrested about 6 p.m. Saturday on an open murder charge.

In his second interview with police, Bennett admitted to spanking the girls with a wooden spoon. He made them do wall-sits. He smacked their faces when they threw tantrums. He covered their mouths with his hand, “using a lot of force,” to make them stop crying, police wrote in the man’s arrest report.

The morning of her death, at the Henderson home Bennett and his daughters shared with his parents, 3-year-old Abygaile Bennett had come into his bedroom screaming, he told police about 7 p.m. the same day.

He got upset after she cried and screamed for about 10 minutes and took her back to the room she shared with her two sisters, put one hand over her mouth and the other on the back of her upper shoulder, near the bottom of her neck, and “while using force,” pressed against her back and mouth, causing her to stop screaming, he told police.

Bennett’s description of that morning’s events also changed in the eight hours between his first and second interviews.

He told police that morning that he had put the girls down for a nap about 10 a.m., went upstairs to check on the girls about 30 minutes later and found Abygaile unconscious with a blanket wrapped twice around her neck, covering her face. He took her to the bathtub to splash water on her face in an attempt to wake her and then took her downstairs and tried CPR, he told police.

He called his mother, who had left for work hours earlier, and then hung up and called police. Paramedics and police found Bennett kneeling over his daughter, who was unconscious and not breathing and wearing a purple shirt and pull-up diaper.

The doctor who saw Abygaile when she arrived at the hospital unconscious told detectives he was certain the girl was a victim of child abuse and that bruising on the girl’s chest was not consistent with CPR.

The Clark County coroner’s office would later find that she suffered a ruptured heart, a contusion to her left lower lung and had an old rib fracture. The cause of her death was blunt chest trauma because of an assault with chronic physical abuse, according to the arrest report.

Child Protective Services had investigated Bennett when he and his wife, who is deployed to Texas with the U.S. Air Force, accused each other of disciplining the children too hard, Bennett’s parents told police. According to the Department of Child and Family Services, the agency received information about Abygaile and her family on Jan. 8.

The child abuse investigation revealed Bennett had forced mustard into his daughters’ mouths when they lied and made them take cold showers as punishment, police wrote in the arrest report. But the agency found there was no present or impending danger to the girls and recommended both parents take parenting classes.

When his wife was deployed earlier this year, Bennett and the girls moved into his parents’ home at 2400 Tilden Way.

Bennett’s parents said the girls never complained of physical abuse and mentioned repeatedly that Abygaile bruised very easily and was possibly anemic. Bennett’s father told police that though his son’s “drill sergeant tactic was a little over the top,” he never witnessed any physical discipline.

The remaining children have been removed from the home and are in the care of the maternal grandparents, police said Sunday.

Contact Kimber Laux at klaux@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0283. Find @lauxkimber on Twitter.