Woman smacks 6-year-old son for not making Mother's Day card for her

Police responded to a domestic disturbance call in South Carolina and found the boy in tears

A woman in US state South Carolina was arrested after she smacked her six-year-old son for not making a Mother’s Day card for her, according to a police report.

Police responded to a domestic disturbance call last Thursday in Spartanburg neighbourhood of South Carolina and found the boy in tears. When an officer questioned him, he said his head hurt and “he was sad".

The police report stated that the boy lived at his grandmother’s house with his mother, Shontrell Murphy, grandma Tracy Murphy and sister. Tracy had called the police and told officers that Shontrell had struck the boy’s head three times “in a hard manner.”

The boy’s sister told the police that she had seen her mother hit him “in the head really hard a few times because of a Mother’s Day card". The boy had made a card for his grandmother but not his mother.



The police have redacted the children’s names from the publicly-available report because they are minors.

According to the police report, Shontrell got upset and tore up the card and then smacked her son’s head repeatedly. The police officer noted that he had seen a hand-written card torn into pieces.

The child was taken to a hospital for evaluation and was released after no physical trauma was found.

Shontrell admitted that she had hit her son to discipline him because she had been “having behavioural issues” with him at school but she insisted she had not hit him hard or violently.

The police booked her for child cruelty and took her to county jail but she was later released after she signed a statement promising to appear in court when required.

 

This article originally appeared in The Smoking Gun.