Police: Texas Man Dumps 4-Year-Old Son by Highway

A father abandoned his 4-year-old son along a West Texas highway, and the injured boy spent several hours alone in the dark before a passing motorist picked him up, police said.

Carlos Rico, 22, stopped his car along a cactus-lined stretch of Interstate 20 near Sweetwater at about 3 a.m. Tuesday and “threw the boy out of the car like a bag of garbage,” Sweetwater police Chief Jim Kelley told the Abilene Reporter-News on Tuesday.

The boy was picked up about three hours later by the local high school basketball coach and taken to a hospital, where doctors removed at least 500 cactus spines from the child’s body, Kelley said. The boy was in the state’s custody on Wednesday.

“I’ve seen a lot of bad things. This is absolutely a first. I’ve never seen a 4-year-old angel left on the side of the road for dead. He’s such a sweet little boy,” he said.

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Rico told Saginaw investigators that God told him to choke the boy and expel him from the car, Kelley said. There was bruising on the boy’s throat, he said.

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