The mother of a boy found dead in a Pennsylvania home said her husband waited four days to reveal to her that their eight-year-old son had died. She only asked him about it after noticing a horrible smell coming from an upstairs bedroom.
Mother Kimberly Tutko said she noticed a strange odor coming from the third floor of her home one Friday night. It was only at that point that her husband, Jarrod Tutko, went upstairs and came back with body of their eight-year-old son, Jarrod Jr., wrapped in a sheet and laid him on the bathroom floor. Looking at the decaying body, quickly realized he had been dead for several days. Her husband said the boy had actually died four days earlier. He just had not told her about it.
“I said to him ‘Why didn’t you say anything?’” Kimberly told police. “He said he was too afraid to say anything because of other kids in the house.”
Kimberly told a reporter she understands people “will find it difficult to believe I did not know my son was dead.”
Apparently the boy was severely mentally disabled and was diagnosed with autism, failure to thrive and Fragile X Syndrome, a genetic defect of the X chromosome. The syndrome causes intellectual disability, as well as behavioral and learning challenges. The mother said Jarrod Jr. was often difficult to control, as he would rip up the flooring and carpeting of his bedroom, smear his feces on the floor and walls, and refused to wear a diaper. He did not attend school because he was agitated by loud noises, she said. News reports stated the dead boy’s room was covered in feces.
The couple has five other children, ages 13, 12, 10, 6 and 3, several of whom suffer from serious medical conditions, including one who is deaf. They were removed from the home Friday night and are being cared for by the county children and youth specialists, police said. Kimberly said one of the children requires 24/7 care as she is in a vegetative state, has a feeding tube, is blind, has a collapsed lung and is confined to a hospital bed on the second floor of the home. She was that child’s primary caregiver, while her husband attended to the now-deceased eight-year-old.
The father has been charged with endangering the welfare of children, concealing the death of a child and abuse of a corpse, according to court records. Kimberly, the mother has not been charged with a crime.
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