Batten Disease: Shocking Secret Video By Mother Caught Boyfriend Battering Disabled Child [Video]

A mother’s intuition is almost always right — and that goes the same for a mother’s suspicion — as one mom found out recently after she set up a secret camera to video her boyfriend’s interactions with her disabled son. After noticing mysterious marks on her 13-year-old son’s body, the mother, who lives in Brazil, decided to trust her own instincts, and on Saturday, set up a hidden camera in order to see how her boyfriend, 27-year-old Jefferson Basilio, also from Brazil, treated her son.

The child, who, like his mother, remains unnamed, suffers from Batten disease. Batten disease is a rare and fatal childhood disease of the nervous system. People with Batten disease lack a certain necessary enzyme that cleans out the body’s cells. The absence of the cell-cleaning enzyme results in cell death, which leads to blindness, loss of both motor and cognitive skills, speech impediments, dementia, and eventually, death during the late teens or early 20s.

There is no cure for Batten disease.

The boy in the video, at age 13, already suffers from severe mobility problems, and it’s reported that the Batten disease also causes extreme muscle sensitivities and pain.

As for why Basilio decided to attack a disabled child with Batten disease, the mother points to jealousy.

“He was jealous because he wanted to travel, he wanted to do lots.”

It’s disturbing enough to see an adult abuse a child, but when a child is already in pain, immobile, and completely defenseless, as well as unable to speak up to let any other adults know about the abuse, it is even more disturbing. The mother firmly believes, of course, that videotaping her boyfriend secretly was the right course of action, and that it saved her child.

“If I had not done it, my son could be dead.”

The video footage is disturbing. The clip shows Brasilio twisting the boy’s arms and manipulating his legs into painful positions. The boy himself can be heard crying out in pain before being carried to another room, out of sight of the camera.

Basilio admitted to the boy’s mother that he had attacked the disabled child, but then refused to give any evidence or confess to police.

Even so, it sounds as though the boy’s mother is not going to let the matter drop simply because Basilio has clammed up.

“My heart is aching too, that man has to pay. He has to pay, have to pay dearly for what he did.”

Basilio, who has not yet appeared in court, could face up to 15 years in Brazilian jail if found guilty.

As sick as it is, disabled children are often a target for abuse, such as the case of one child who was actually chained to a toilet for a year by her own mother. For more on that harrowing case, click here.