SAN ANTONIO (AP) — A San Antonio-area couple punished their young children by forcing one to eat and brush her teeth with cat feces, shocking the same child with a dog's training collar and beating them all with a thorny switch, according to arrest warrants provided by the Bexar County sheriff's office.
James Howard Chalkley, 32, was charged Monday with one count of injury to a child and his 22-year-old wife, Cheyanne, was charged with two counts of injury to a child. James Chalkley is the father of a 3-year-old boy and two girls who are 5 and 10. Cheyanne Chalkley is their stepmother.
The arrest warrants show a teacher noticed bruising on the 5-year-old in September. Child protective workers subsequently interviewed each of the girls, revealing the extent of the abuse, after which all of the children were removed from their home in Converse and placed in foster care.
The children told their foster mother about a time their father became angry because he believed the children had deliberately failed to clean up cat feces that he found in a closet. He smeared the animal waste on at least two of them, forced the 5-year-old to eat it and brushed her teeth with feces on a brush with such force that she bled,