Parents headed to prison in abuse case

Standard-Examiner (Ogden, UT)

Author: TIM GURRISTER

Standard-Examiner staff

tgurrister@standard.net

OGDEN -- Two parents are prison-bound after officials Friday in 2nd District Court detailed the couple's intentional, prolonged "torture" of an adoptive son.

Three different child advocates told Judge W. Brent West that Scott and Catherine Kanani Nelson's was the worst case of child abuse they'd ever seen.

The "haunting," "systematic," and "sadistic" injuries described included frostbite from being forced to sleep solely in his underwear in a shed the boy called "the spider house" in sub-zero temperatures, bruising everywhere with the worst in the groin, and a psychological degradation that may take decades to overcome.

School officials on Feb. 4 of last year notified the state Division of Child and Family Services that the then 7-year-old showed injuries. "We found him hungry, covered with bruises and terrified to go home," Stephanie Stuart, a DCFS protective services worker, told the judge.

"It is our belief that if we had not intervened the child would not be alive today," she said.

Judge West took up that theme in announcing sentence at the end of Friday's hour-long hearing, saying, "There's no telling what would have happened if someone else had not intervened."

After listening to defense attorneys press for jail time for the Roy couple instead of prison, West said, "It's not even a close call in my estimation. Prison is appropriate. No one is more vulnerable than children to their parents."

While noting Kanani Nelson supplied most of the injuries, West singled Scott Nelson as a former Salt Lake County correctional officer, since resigned over the charges. "You come from law enforcement, a profession of people we're supposed to be able to turn to for help."

Both were sentenced to up to five years in the Utah State Prison, having accepted a plea bargain in November reducing the charges from a second-degree felony. Officials said the plea bargain was necessary to shield the now 8-year-old boy from the trauma of testifying.

Almost a year later, he is only now able to talk to a therapist about the abuse, Stuart said, reading from a letter she said was written in concert with all DCFS staffers who came in contact with him. West also ordered the Nelsons to pay for all his future counseling and mental health treatment.

He and his younger sister, uninjured but removed from the Nelson home along with her brother, are now "blossoming" in their foster parents home, said Cindy Havlicek, the juvenile court guardian ad litem assigned the case.

"He's becoming very outgoing," she said. "He sings. He dances. He loves to play with his little sister."

That contrasts with the abuse he received from October of 2003 through February of 2004 after an adoption agency placed him with the Nelsons, speaking no English, after his Samoan family gave him up, hoping for a better life for him and his sister, as officials described it.

"He was pushed down stairs, kicked and hit," Stuart said. "He was stood upon. He was so hungry he ate until he vomited. He asked to stay in the Christmas Box House (an Ogden children's shelter on west 12th Street) forever."

A letter from Jeanlee Carver, a nurse with Weber County's Children's Justice Center who examined the boy, was read in court: "It was difficult to find an area of his body that didn't have bruises."

"In 20 years as a prosecutor I've never felt a case tug at the heart like this one," Weber County Attorney Mark DeCaria told West. "He was made to feel somehow he deserved this treatment."