Killer who tossed toddler’s body in creek gets life
Kurt A. Flood had plenty to say during his trial for beating a 14-month-old boy to death and tossing the child’s body in an East Side creek.
On Thursday, he was silent when it came time for him to be sentenced.
“I don’t want to speak,” Flood said when given an opportunity to make a statement.
Franklin County Common Pleas Judge Michael J. Holbrook then imposed the maximum sentence: life in prison with no chance of parole for 19 years.
A jury last week convicted Flood, 27, of murder, felonious assault, child endangering, tampering with evidence and abuse of a corpse in the death of Cameron Beckford. Police found the child’s body on Dec. 31, 2014, stuffed in a backpack in the frigid waters of Big Walnut Creek.
The mandatory sentence for murder is 15 years to life. The judge sentenced Flood to the maximum three years for tampering with evidence and one year for abuse of a corpse, to run consecutively to the murder sentence.
Flood testified for two hours during the trial, denying that he ever hit Cameron and blaming the mother, Dainesha Stevens, for inflicting the fatal injuries. He testified that he helped her dispose of the body “out of the goodness of my heart.”
During Assistant Prosecutor Jennifer Rausch’s closing argument to the jury, Flood spoke up again, interrupting to say her argument “doesn’t make sense at all.”
Stevens, 28, testified that Cameron died two days after a Christmas Eve 2014 beating by Flood, who told her he was trying to beat demons out of the child. She said she did nothing to protect her son and conspired with Flood to dispose of the body.
She worked out a deal with prosecutors, pleading guilty to involuntary manslaughter and tampering with evidence and agreeing to testify against Flood in exchange for a 12-year sentence.
Stevens, her son and her 6-year-old daughter had moved to Columbus from Maryland in mid-December 2014 to escape a difficult relationship with the children’s father. Flood, an old friend, offered to let them stay with him at his house on Kornwal Drive on the East Side, she said.
Cameron’s father, who remains in Maryland, did not attend any of the trial or Thursday’s sentencing. The father now has custody of Cameron’s sister.
Defense attorney Lewis Dye asked the judge to be as lenient as possible in sentencing, saying that the case involved “the most mental illness I’ve ever seen.”
The judge ruled in March 2016 that Flood was incompetent to stand trial after two psychologists determined that he had a serious mental illness. After five months of in-patient treatment at a state psychiatric hospital, Flood was found competent and preparations began for his trial.
Dye did not introduce evidence of mental illness at trial or seek a not-guilty-by-reason-of-insanity verdict.