A Canadian couple is standing trial for first-degree murder after the body of a 12-year-old boy — one of two brothers they were in the process of adopting — was found locked in their basement.
Becky Hamber, 45, and Brandy Cooney, 43, appeared in court last week as the prosecution’s key witness took the stand: the victim’s younger brother, now 13.
He was 10 years old when he says he watched his brother slowly waste away from “severe malnutrition” before the boy died on Dec. 21, 2022.
The surviving child first spoke to police the day after his brother’s funeral in January 2023, according to reporting by the Toronto Star. He alleged that Hamber and Cooney frequently punished the boys by restraining them with zip ties, locking them in their basement bedrooms, and forcing them to sleep in wetsuits.
“Yesterday I saw my sibling and, you know, he’s dead. He’s the first dead body I’ve ever seen in real life,” he told officers with the Halton Regional Police Service, adding that he had vomited three times from anxiety before the interview.
Later that month, police arrested Hamber and Cooney and initially charged them with assault, forcible confinement, and criminal negligence causing bodily harm as investigators looked into the boy’s claims.
Officers asked the surviving brother to return for a second interview in September 2023. According to the Star, he cried as he described how his brother would often shield him from punishment: whenever he did something wrong, his older brother would say, “You know what, I did it.”
He also testified in court that one of the punishments they faced was being forbidden to speak for days at a time, the Burlington Post reported.
At trial, pediatrician Dr. Emma Cory told the court that the victim weighed just 48 pounds at the time of his death — less than he had weighed at age 6, according to the CBC. One defense attorney remarked that the boy appeared like a “Holocaust survivor.” The younger brother testified that at one point his sibling’s weight had dropped as low as 43 pounds.
A therapist who had been working with the couple said she had objected to their methods years before the boy’s death, the Toronto Sun reported. She alleged that the women zip tied the boy into his pajamas and later into wetsuits so he could not remove his clothing to use the bathroom.
She also denied a claim by defense attorneys that she had ever encouraged the use of zip ties to restrain the brothers. Most of her testimony drew directly from her clinical notes, which focused largely on the defendants — with one especially haunting exception.
Shortly before his death, she recorded the boy telling her: “He reports that he wants a forever family for Christmas.”
Hamber and Cooney have each pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder.
