A man, Ryan Cato, 34 has been charged with abusing his girlfriend’s 10-year-old son until he died of horrific injuries in Manhattan, New York.
The man, according to prosecutors, has a history of disturbing domestic violence arrests including choking the mother of his own children.
Late on Monday, March 8, Cato was ordered held without bail at his arraignment on murder charges in Manhattan Criminal Court.
He inflicted his girlfriend’s son with fatal injuries including a lacerated spleen, a lacerated liver, a lacerated kidney, rib fractures on both sides and bruising between his toes.
Speaking, on Monday March 8, the NYPD said the boy’s injuries were both old and new and he died from fatal child abuse.
Police say they responded to a 911 call from the accused killer on Saturday afternoon and found 10-year-old Ayden Wolfe barely alive when they got to the family’s fourth-floor apartment in the Saint Nicholas Houses.
Ayden was unconscious and soaked with water from a failed attempt to wake him, sources said.
He was now rushed to Harlem Hospital, where he was pronounced dead at 3:20 p.m.
Police Commissioner Dermot Shea called Ayden’s death a “horrific case.”
Chief Detective Rodney Harrison described the boy’s injuries as “extensive bruising to his face, the extremities and all over the body.”
“Some injuries were old, but others were recent,” Harrison said.
Back in December Cato was arrested for allegedly choking the mother of his kids in front of their two children inside their apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
According to a criminal complaint, he hit the woman in the face several times and put his hands around her neck and applied pressure.
A relative said Ayden’s mom was a teenage brain cancer survivor, and was told she’d never have children, a prognosis she proved wrong when she gave birth to Ayden, her only child.