Woman admits dumping boiling water on 3-year-old boy in a ‘house of horrors’ – NJ.com

A woman admitted to scalding a 3-year-old boy she cared for as punishment for urinating on the floor of her son’s bedroom in an apartment she shared with five other adults and five other children, officials said.

Patricia Buchan, 29, of Newark said in court recently that on Dec. 4, 2018 that she told the boy to take off his clothes, get in a bathtub and then took a pot of boiling water from the stove and poured it over his lower body, resulting in second-degree burns, the Essex County Prosecutor’s Office announced Friday.

“This child lived his first three years in a house of horrors,’’ Essex County Assistant Prosecutor Michael Morris said in a statement. “Today’s plea resolves the case without the ordeal of the children having to testify.”

Buchan, and the five other adults living in the Clinton Place apartment, were originally charged with aggravated assault and endangering the welfare of a child, along with but prosecutors did not say what Buchan plead guilty to in their statement Friday.

Prosecutors have said the abuse of boy, which began in July 2018 was a “systematic and coordinated beating” of the child with a belt and their fists by the adults. They also poured scalding water on him to punish him, officials said.

The child, hospitalized in order to treat his injuries, was treated and released from the hospital and was in protective custody, Newark police said last year.

Newark public preschool officials alerted police to the abuse, an investigation was started, Buchan and the five other adults who lived together were arrested on Dec. 12, authorities said.

Also charged are the mother of the 3-year-old boy, Natacha Smith, 44, of Newark; Patricia Gamarra, 63; Mary Buchan, 56; Bridget Buchan, 24; and Homer Searcy, 40, prosecutors said.

They have all been indicted but their cases were still pending on Friday, Essex County Prosecutor’s Office Spokeswoman Katherine Carter said.

Searcy was dating Smith but is not related to the boy that was scalded, Carter said. Mary Buchan and Gamarra are sisters and Patricia Buchan and Bridget Buchan are Mary’s daughters, according to the statement.

The boy was one of six children who lived in the apartment, including four of Patricia Buchan’s biological children, ranging in age from one to seven, Carter said. She now has a fifth child with whom she was pregnant when she burned the 3-year-old boy.

She faced up to five years in state prison under the terms of her plea deal and was scheduled to be sentenced on Dec. 6.

Chris Sheldon may be reached at csheldon@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @chrisrsheldon Find NJ.com on Facebook.

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