Aaron Vanmeter: Kicked 6-Year-Old In Head With Steel Boot, Cops Say — Cites ‘Anger Management Issues’


Aaron Vanmeter, 21, got fed up with his girlfriend’s 6-year-old son — a special needs child — because the boy “wouldn’t listen.” Now the little boy is on full life support in a Washington, D.C., hospital, with head injuries so severe that doctors say at least part of his brain has died.

According to police, based on statements they took from the boy’s mother, the child’s shocking injuries came from a horrific beating dished out by Vanmeter to the little boy outside the woman’s home in Hancock, Maryland — a beating that included at least one kick to the head with Vanmeter’s steel-toed work boot.

Vanmeter later told investigating officers from the Washington County Sheriff’s Office that he intended to “scare (the boy) into being good,” court documents say. But Vanmeter confessed that, more than just giving the child a “scare,” he kicked him, struck the little boy with a belt and slapped him hard across the head.

But according to police, Vanmeter said the he did not mean to kick the boy as hard as he did, and he admitted that the supposed “discipline” he administered to the child was too much — but he is “working through anger management issues.”

When Hancock police officers initially responded, shortly after noon on July 3, to an emergency call about a child who wasn’t breathing, Vanmeter and the boy’s mother told them that the child had taken a bad fall down the steps while running.

But when the officers saw the extensive bruises and welts that badly marked the boy’s face, head, arms, and legs, they didn’t buy that story. That’s when they called in detectives from the Washington County Sheriff’s Office.

And it didn’t take the doctors who examined the unconscious boy long to realize that his injuries were not the result of a fall, but of extreme and deliberate child abuse.

The boy “sustained severe head trauma that was causing the brain to bleed and swell,” doctors told the detectives. The child also suffered a stroke from the beating, which “caused a portion of his brain to die.”

The boy’s mother later changed her story and told police that Vanmeter kicked her son with his work boot. When police told Vanmeter what his girlfriend had said, he told them, “I don’t do anything that she doesn’t do to him.”

The sickening incident was the second terrible child abuse story of the week to come out of Washington County, Maryland. On Tuesday, Robert Leroy Wilson severely beat his girlfriend’s 9-year-old son, police say, because the child ate a piece of birthday cake without permission. That boy died on Monday morning.

Aaron Vanmeter told police, “he is working through anger management issues and he gets frustrated because (the boy) is a special needs child and won’t listen,” court documents say. He is being held on $1 million bond, charged with first- and second-degree assault, first-degree child abuse with severe physical injury, and second-degree child abuse. But if the boy he admitted attacking passes away from his injuries, things could get much worse for Aaron Vanmeter, as well.

[Image: Washington County Sheriff’s Department]

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