A 14-year-old boy (b. 2005) was choked, beaten, neglected, and imprisoned by his father, Anthony Jerome Lewis. The boy’s mother was also present and witnessed the abuse but did not stop or report it. The boy was homeschooled.
When he was growing up, Anthony Lewis’s son was often sent to live with his aunt due to incidents of abuse. At the beginning of 2019, he returned home to live with his mother and father. In January of that year, Lewis removed the boy from school to homeschool him. Instead of teaching him, though, Lewis forced him to do chores, such as cleaning the house. When he wasn’t working, the boy was forced to stay in his room with no television, phone, or access to the internet. He had only two pairs of clothes at a time. If he needed to use the bathroom, he was forced to ask Lewis for permission.
During this time, Lewis physically assaulted his son at least three times. In one incident, the boy said that Lewis choked him until he saw “weird colors” and “it started turning black.” On another occasion, he was beaten with electrical cords and belts twenty times each. At one point, the boy disclosed to his father and mother that he was having suicidal thoughts. With the boy’s mother watching, Lewis brought a shotgun, put it between the boy’s legs, and forced his fingers onto the trigger. “Do it,” he said. “Just do it. End it now.”
On November 20, 2019, police were called to the high school that Lewis’s son had begun attending to respond to a report of child abuse. The boy spoke to police, describing the abuse he experienced at Lewis’s hands between January 19th and June 30th of that year. Lewis was charged with first- and second-degree assault, reckless endangerment, second-degree child abuse, providing means of assisting suicide, use of a firearm in a violent crime, and failure to send his child to school, and has been ordered to have no contact with his son.
Date: November 20, 2019
Location: Odenton, Maryland
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