Man gets 9 years for beating 2-year-old boy
Case stems from 2015 incident; Maes to receive four years credit for being on electronic monitoring
A man accused of beating his then-girlfriend’s 2-year-old son so badly the child suffered brain damage and partial paralysis was sentenced to nine years in prison Tuesday as part of a plea agreement with the First Judicial District Attorney’s Office.
Benjamin Maes, 32, pleaded guilty in May to one count of attempted child abuse resulting in great bodily harm and one count of child abuse as part of an agreement with prosecutors, which gave a judge discretion to sentence him to between five and a half and nine years in prison, according to a plea agreement.
After he’s credited for about 1,500 days while awaiting trial on electronic monitoring over the past four years, Deputy District Attorney Haley Murphy said in court, the sentence will put Maes behind bars for “a couple of years.”
The incident occurred in
September 2015 after the boy’s grandmother dropped the boy and his sister off with Maes at an apartment he shared with their mother, Murphy said.
About 30 minutes later, Maes called the boy’s mother at work and said she needed to come home because he was crying and throwing up, Murphy said.
When the child’s mother returned home, the prosecutor added, the toddler’s eyes began to roll back in his head and he suffered a seizure. He was was airlifted to an Albuquerque hospital for treatment, where imaging showed he had a brain bleed. He also suffered a stroke and other complications.
Murphy said some of the issues were “attributable to a genetic predisposition, but all of them triggered by the abuse.”
Murphy read a statement from the child’s mother, who attended the hearing remotely Tuesday, in which she said Maes permanently damaged her son’s brain and body.
When he cries at night, the boy’s mother wrote, she doesn’t know if it’s because of one of his frequent nightmares or his near-constant head pain.
State District Judge T. Glenn Ellington sentenced Maes — who is from Glorieta, according to previous reports — to the maximum allowed under the agreement despite the pleas for leniency from his attorney and family members who said Maes had
reformed himself. They noted he spent more than four years on electronic monitoring without a violation while awaiting trial.
Maes’ wife told the judge she doesn’t want their 22-month-old daughter to grow up without him.
The judge seemed unmoved. “A lot of the argument we heard this afternoon for leniency really deals with other people,” he said before sentencing Maes. “This case isn’t about your daughter. It isn’t about your mother or your father or your family sitting back there. … This case is about that little boy who was defenseless in your hands.”
Whatever happened, Ellington said to Maes, “it didn’t justify your actions.”
The judge said a pre-sentence diagnostic evaluation indicated Maes — who declined an opportunity to address the court — has “always feigned a lack of knowledge as to what happened.”
That does happen, Ellington noted. He said some people are “so wasted on drugs or alcohol” that they’ve “pickled” that part of their brain.
“What also happens,” the judge said, “is people do horrific things to other people and build an internal barrier in their own minds because their behavior doesn’t comport with who they think they are.”
“At the time, you were a bitter person, a drug addict who was out of control,” Ellington said to Maes. “You blamed everyone else for the ills in your life and took it out on a little boy. He will will pay for your bad day for the rest of his life.”
The case has taken a long and
winding road to resolution.
A grand jury indicted Maes, then 25, on one count of intentional child abuse resulting in great bodily harm in December 2015, according to online court records.
The case went to trial in 2018, but the judge declared a mistrial after jurors were unable to reach a unanimous verdict — in part, Ellington said Tuesday, because there were no witnesses to the crime.
The District Attorney’s Office indicated at the time it intended to retry the case, asking in an expedited motion that the case be reset for trial “as soon as possible.”
But it languished for nearly four more years, with trial dates being set and continued at least twice in 2019, according to online court records.
The District Attorney’s Office did not respond to emails seeking comment.