When Microsoft Corporation came out with the Xbox they most assuredly wanted, of course, its users to become enthralled with their video games system. However, they didn’t expect users of the system to become so engrossed in the video games that they would lose all sense of parental judgment and control. But that’s what apparently happened when one man, who spent several hours each day playing video games, became enraged when his 17-month-old daughter pulled his Xbox down onto the floor.
According to the prosecutor, 27-year-old Tyrone Spellman, of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, who also answers to the name Anwar Salahuddin, played video games six to seven hours per day. On the day in question in September 2006, while the child’s pregnant mother, 21-year-old Mia Turman, slept in another room, the child, Alayiah, pulled at the cords to the Xbox while her father played a video game, eventually causing the game console to fall. Spellman, apparently angered over the mishap, allegedly punched his daughter about the face and head and cracked her skull in several places. He fled the house after the beating.
When Turman awoke she called paramedics to their home because she discovered that Alayiah was not breathing. The child was taken by ambulance to Temple University Hospital, where she was pronounced dead at 12:37 p.m. An autopsy subsequently revealed that, in addition to the cracked skull, the child had suffered a broken arm approximately two weeks earlier—an injury that social workers had failed to notice during a visit to the home in August 2006.
A day after his arrest, Spellman allegedly confessed to the police. Initially charged with murder, endangering the welfare of a child and possessing an instrument of crime, Spellman was in jail during the birth of his second child, also a girl, who would never meet the sister that her father had beaten to death. The second child was promptly removed from the mother’s custody by city social workers.
In January 2008, Tyrone Spellman went before a jury that did not believe his lawyer’s argument that Spellman confessed to beating the child to protect the mother and convicted him of third-degree murder and child endangerment. He was acquitted of first-degree murder, and faces anywhere from 23 to 47 years in prison when he is sentenced.
"My baby is gone at the hands of her father," Alayiah’s mother told an NBC affiliate. "I have to put her in the ground. I shouldn’t have to do this…I will never understand this."
Spellman purportedly was unhappy with the jury’s verdict. Unless he can gain access to an Xbox or some other system in prison, it will likely be some time before Spellman will play another video game. He will also have plenty of time to think about the fact that his actions are the reason that his surviving child will never know her sister.
