A Florida mother who was caught on video throwing her adopted 4-year-old son into a pool with his hands tied behind his back has now been charged with the boy’s murder.
Detectives arrested 36-year-old Patricia Saintizaire and charged her with first-degree murder, aggravated child abuse, and tampering with a witness in connection to the death of four-year-old Bryan Boyer, whom she adopted from Haiti last year.
Bryan died last week after being hospitalized for significant injuries connected to an abdominal bleed that couldn’t be repaired during surgery.
The Polk County Sheriff’s Office released a timeline of events leading up to his death.
On May 1, investigators said the boy came home from school “happy and behaving normally, with no injuries.” Surveillance videos from his school and bus as well as interviews with people he interacted with confirmed his physical and emotional state that day.
His 16-year-old brother, who was also adopted from Haiti, told detectives he didn’t see or hear anything happening to his younger brother because he went in another room after Bryan arrived home from school.
After two hours, Saintizaire ordered him to bring Bryan some food. He found Bryan unable to walk and struggling to sit up on his own. Bryan also vomited three times and began to “visibly shake,” according to an affidavit.
Saintizaire said he was “faking it,” but Bryan became unresponsive. His older brother tried performing CPR, but Saintizaire ultimately decided to take him to the hospital.
Bryan was first hospitalized in Davenport, but his wounds were so critical that he needed to be airlifted to another hospital in Orlando, where he died.
Hospital staff notified deputies on May 2 that the child died under what appeared to be suspicious circumstances. His body was taken to a medical examiner’s office on May 3 for an autopsy.
The medical examiner found scarring on Bryan’s back as well as fresh scars that would have been inflicted while he was living in America, including a deep laceration that was caused by targeted blunt-force trauma.
Bryan also sustained a laceration to his liver that would have caused a rapid decline in his health. Bruising was also found on his arms and legs.
The medical examiner reported that all of the injuries were consistent with ongoing abuse and concluded that the 4-year-old died from assault/blunt-force trauma. His manner of death was ruled a homicide.
“What we’ve learned during this investigation just turns our stomach,” Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd said in a news conference posted on Facebook. “It is beyond my wildest imagination how anyone could abuse a beautiful little fella like this child was abused and neglected.”
Saintizaire’s husband, Rene, told investigators that his wife was the disciplinarian in the household, but Saintizaire repeatedly said she never resorted to physical abuse as a form of punishment.
However, during a forensic review of Saintizaire’s phone, detectives found two videos from home surveillance cameras that show her actively hitting Bryan with an unknown object as he was lying on the floor motionless.
“We have another video clip where he’s face down on the floor and she’s beating him on the back, and he’s not even resisting it. It’s like it’s a normal occurrence.”
Another video clip shows Saintizaire throwing him into a pool while both his hands were bound.
“He’s dead because she beat him to death,” Judd said.
Bryan’s older brother initially denied being abused or witnessing any abuse when detectives interviewed him. After being taken into the custody of child protective services, he confessed that his mother ordered him to “say nothing so I don’t get in trouble,” and that she threatened to kill him with a gun.
Rene and Patricia Saintizaire adopted Bryan in April 2023 when he was 3. Rene Saintizaire was at work when Bryan died and isn’t facing charges at this time.
