14-year-old testifies Tennessee stepmother burned brother's genitals with lit cigarette

A fourteen-year-old boy sat on the stand for more than an hour Wednesday to testify about the nearly six months of abuse he says he and his older brother suffered at the hands of his stepmother, Jessica Cox.

He told a judge he and his sixteen-year-old brother were both beaten by the woman, but it was the older child who bore the brunt of Cox's abuse. He said the teen was forced to sit for hours handcuffed to a kitchen cabinet and went days without food. Then there were the beatings, when the younger son said he witnessed his step-mom hitting his brother in the feet with rolling pins and mallets. And there was the time where she allegedly held his head under water in an icy bath tub, before burning his penis with a lit cigarette.

The child said it all led up to May 28th when both children sat handcuffed together on the kitchen floor, their cuffs looped around a kitchen cabinet. They stealthily began removing the tupperware contents so the younger boy would be able to crawl through and free them from the anchor. Then they waited until the trailer they shared with Cox, their biological father Mike McIntosh, and Cox's son went to sleep, and slipped out a window.

Read more from our news partners at The Tennessean.

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