Philadelphia Couple Gets 30+ Years In Prison For Starving Son To Death
By Tony Hanson
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- A couple from the Point Breeze section of the city was sentenced today to 30-60 years in prison for the murder-by-abuse of their young son.
The abuses suffered by the six-year-old victim were described by both the judge and the prosecutor as the worst case they have ever seen.
Philadelphia prosecutor Edward McCann says Khalil Wimes weighed just 29 pounds when he died in March of last year, having been starved and beaten right up to the day before he died (see related story).
Old and new injuries covered his entire body.
The victim's grandmother suggested that defendants Tina Cuffie and Latiff Hadi be forced to look at their son's picture in their prison cells. McCann offered a similar idea: that they should have to wear his pictures: one, a healthy Khalil before they took custody at age three, and another, the boy on the coroner's table.
"Everyone should know what they did over the course of, as the judge aptly said, three years, where this child really was tortured, physically tortured -- deprived of food, deprived of company, kept in a cage essentially, locked away from people who loved him," McCann said.
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Family members who had helped raise Khalil for the first three years of his life testified they were cut off from the child once Cuffie and Hadi got custody. Those other family members sobbed in court as they described the unending heartache of their loss.
