The 8-year-old boy arrived at Children’s National Hospital screaming in pain. Burns to his chest, arms and neck — ignored for two weeks by his mother — were deeply infected and starting to scar, constricting the child’s movements.
“His little, tiny body was hunched into itself,” Judge Rachel McGuckian said from the bench in Montgomery County, Md., last week. “It was just horrible.”
Then McGuckian sentenced the woman sitting before her, Kimberly Tyler, to 25 years in prison, ending a case that began four years ago inside a cramped apartment in Montgomery’s Germantown area in the early weeks of the coronavirus pandemic.
Tyler, 31, cried quietly during Friday’s sentencing in circuit court. Through her attorney, she maintained that the burns were accidental, caused when she inadvertently knocked over a pot of scalding grease from the stove. The delay in seeking medical care, she has long said, was largely the fault of other family members.
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But at Tyler’s trial late last year — which ended with jurors convicting her of first-degree child abuse, child neglect and other crimes — prosecutors presented a far different version: Enraged that her son had spilled cereal on the floor, Tyler punished him by pouring rubbing alcohol on one of his hands and setting it on fire, authorities said. The flames spread, engulfing his body before she rushed him into the shower. They said Tyler never called 911.
“She went into self-preservation mode: ‘How can I make sure I don’t get in trouble for what I just did?’” Assistant State’s Attorney Sheila Bagheri said in court.
Without medical treatment, the boy’s injuries became ever more painful. At the hospital, he required care not just from a trauma surgeon but also an infectious-disease team. He underwent more than 20 surgeries — spaced out because he’d lose so much blood — to excise dead tissue and graft skin from his thighs and back onto his wounds, according trial testimony from his surgeon.
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Just changing his dressings could take more than an hour and was so painful that the youngster sometimes screamed in pain or wiggled to try to jump off the bed. To prevent his neck scars from pulling his mouth into a frown, the boy wore a neck collar for 23 hours a day.
Photos of his wounds — yellow, red and black, and spread across his body — were shown to jurors. McGuckian said in court last week that she didn’t need to review the images: “They will remain in my head for the rest of my life.”
The child stayed at Children’s Hospital for several months and will return soon for more surgeries on his neck and the left side of his face, said the aunt who is now raising him.
“He doesn’t like speaking about his mom, about the incident,” the aunt said in court Friday. “He has shared that he was set on fire for fixing a bowl of cereal. That’s what he shared.”
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Her nephew’s damaged skin prompts awkward looks and teasing, but he stays strong and endures. “Even through his scars,” his aunt said, her voice choking up, “he’s a happy child.”
The Washington Post is not naming the child because he is a juvenile crime victim. He has the same last name as his aunt, whose name is also being withheld to shield the child’s identify. He does not share his mother’s last name.
Tyler grew up in Montgomery, has a cosmetology certificate and was a hairstylist at a salon in Bethesda, Md. By the spring of 2020, she and her wife were living with six children in a two-bedroom apartment in Germantown as pandemic lockdowns were spreading. “She was trying to do the best she could,” said defense attorney David Booth.
Exactly what happened late one morning in May that year was vigorously debated at Tyler’s trial.
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She testified that after heating the pot of grease, she went to her bedroom and came out to find cereal on the kitchen floor. She told jurors that she determined the 8-year-old was responsible, even though he quit answering her questions. “He kept his head down,” Tyler told jurors, adding, “In the midst of me raising my voice, moving my body around out of frustration, my arm goes to hit the pot, the pot flips over the stove.”
When hot grease poured onto her son and he screamed, she said, she rushed him to the bathtub and doused him with cold water from the shower. She said she then took off his clothes, wrapped him in a towel and placed him on her bed.
Under questioning from Booth, Tyler said she didn’t notice any raised marks or blood on her son. Someone in the apartment called Tyler’s parents, who traveled to Germantown from their home in nearby Howard County. Tyler said her father took her to a Walgreen’s, where they bought Neosporin, burn cream and bandages. Then Tyler’s parents took their grandson home to stay with them. “I just thought they knew what they were doing,” Tyler testified.
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Prosecutors said Tyler did little to check on her son for the two weeks he was with her parents. As his condition worsened, her father urged Tyler to seek medical care for the child and sent her videos of the boy wrapped in bandages, struggling to move, wincing in pain.
“So from when he was burned, every single day of those two weeks, you never called for help, right?” Bagheri asked during cross examination.
“No,” Tyler said.
“You didn’t call a doctor?”
“No.”
“You didn’t call 911?”
“No.”
Tyler’s father, Kimball Tyler, eventually took the boy back to Tyler’s apartment for a day or two before picking him up and taking him to the hospital. He later pleaded guilty to reckless endangerment and testified for the prosecution at his daughter’s trial, according to court records. The records show that his case was resolved with a probation-before-judgment finding and no jail time.
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Charges against Tyler’s mother, Lisa Jones, are being held in abeyance and probably will be dismissed this year, according to court records.
Among the prosecution’s witnesses was Randall Burd, chief of trauma and burn surgery at Children’s National Hospital, who treated the boy. He said the wounds, owing to their depth and positioning on the body, looked more like open-flame injuries than burns from a hot spill.
Tyler’s younger sister, who was 15 and staying at the apartment on the morning of the incident, also was a prosecution witness. She told jurors she heard her nephew screaming and saw him rushing toward the bathroom. “He was in flames,” the sister testified. She also recalled seeing the white T-shirt he had been wearing, which had been removed and had turned a brownish-black. “He was in pain,” she said. “He was kind of moaning.”
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Kimberly Tyler’s wife, Chareese Snorgrass-Tyler, who lived with her in the Germantown apartment and saw the boy’s injuries, pleaded guilty to neglect of a minor and was sentenced to six months in jail, according to court records.
Attorneys for Kimball Tyler, Jones and Snorgrass-Tyler could not be reached for comment.
In court filings, prosecutors faulted all four adults in the case for failing the child, but called Kimberly Tyler “the leading force behind preventing him from getting medical attention.” In court last week, the judge cited Tyler’s father’s contrition and cooperation when he appeared as a witness.
“He felt terrible about his role in all of this, and he should,” McGuckian said. “But he did take responsibility, and he was the one who ultimately took [the child] to the hospital, over Ms. Tyler’s objection and specific instruction not to.”
