Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, October 31, 1995 TAG: 9510310098
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LAURENCE HAMMACK STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Tonya L. Basham, a Roanoke woman convicted of beating, burning and biting a 17-old-month-old child she was caring for, was sentenced Monday to 30 years in prison.
Basham received the maximum sentence from Roanoke Circuit Judge Robert Doherty on charges of malicious wounding and child neglect.
"This is a horrible case," Assistant Commonwealth's Attorney Ann Gardner said in asking for a lengthy sentence. "This child was burned, beaten and bitten literally from head to toe."
Anthony Harvey's many injuries were inflicted over three months, but the abuse came to the attention of authorities only after a blow to the head left him unconscious the morning of March 7 at Basham's apartment on Hunt Avenue Northwest.
After Harvey was rushed to Community Hospital of Roanoke Valley, doctors learned the full extent of his injuries - burns to his feet, buttocks and ear; a bite wound to his left cheek; bruising on his hands; serious head injuries; and cocaine in his bloodstream.
Basham, who was taking care of Harvey while his mother looked for a place to live, told police at first that the injuries were accidents. She said the child splashed hot water on himself while playing in the bathtub, and that other injuries were caused when he fell on a sidewalk or played with other children.
But after being confronted with photographs of the injuries one by one, Basham confessed.
She told police that she bit the child on the cheek after he bit her finger and would not let go; that she placed a hot hair dryer on his buttocks when he got in the way as she was doing her hair; that she turned the hot water on him to teach him not to play in the bathtub; that she slapped his hands with a shoe to make him stop picking at the dead and peeling skin on his badly burned feet; that he must have been exposed to cocaine during a visit with her crack-smoking friend.
On Monday, Basham recanted her previous confessions.
"They kept pressuring me," Basham said, claiming that police coerced her into making the statements during a lengthy interrogation. "I was just trying to hurry up and get out of the room because I had been there for so long.
"I loved Anthony just like he was my own child," Basham, 24, testified as she went back to her original story that he was overly accident-prone. "I love kids. I plan on having some more kids sometime soon."
Basham said she agreed to take care of Harvey - her boyfriend's son by another woman - because his father was in prison and his mother was homeless.
"Didn't nobody want Anthony," she testified. "I didn't want to see him in a foster home."
In asking for a lenient sentence, defense attorney Deborah Caldwell-Bono argued that Basham's actions were the result of ignorance more than malice, and that she was trying to care for him the best that she could.
"She's not a monster who went out and looked for a child to hurt," Caldwell-Bono said.
In sentencing Basham to the maximum, Doherty said he believed what she told police was the truth, and that since then she has offered only "one excuse after another."
After spending several weeks at Community Hospital, Harvey was released to the custody of the Department of Social Services. He is now living with relatives and is making a steady recovery from his injuries.
Harvey's mother, Tammy L. Harvey, is scheduled to be sentenced Friday on a child neglect charge for leaving her son in Basham's care, then doing nothing after she learned that he had been injured.
by CNB