A mother, her live-in boyfriend, and his wife were all facing charges after the disturbing and horrifically heartless thing they did to the woman’s child. The boy’s brother finally exposed exactly what happened, and once you hear what they did to the toddler over the course of three days, the death penalty sounds too kind.
Scotty McMillan of Pennsylvania was just three years old when he met a tragic end at the hands of his own mother Jillian Tait and her 25-year-old boyfriend Gary Fellenbaum, all while Fellenbaum’s wife Amber watched. After the child suffered days of torture before passing away, the three adults involved, who Chester County District Attorney Tom Hogan said all lived together in a trailer park on Hope Lane in West Caln Township, were arrested for their part in the child’s death.
After 911 dispatchers received a phone call for an unresponsive child, EMTs arrived at a horrific scene. Scott McMillan was dead, and his little corpse was littered with bruises, lacerations, and puncture wounds. Fellenbaum and Tait then shockingly confessed to brutally torturing the boy, beating him with “homemade weapons such as a whip, a curtain rod, and an aluminum strip.”
According to police, the couple tied the boy to a chair with electric tape and also strung him up by his heels, where they continued to assault him until he was – as sad as it is to say – graced with death. Disturbingly, this inhumane treatment of a child all started when little Scotty didn’t want to eat his breakfast. “After having beaten him into an unresponsive state and then put him on an uninflated air mattress, Tait and Fellenbaum went car shopping, bought pizza and engaged in sexual activity as he lay dying, according to officials,” Daily Mail reported.
“Little Scotty McMillan is dead,” DA Hogan said in a public statement. “Over a three day period, he was systematically tortured and beaten to death. He was punched in the face and in the stomach. He was scourged with a homemade whip. He was lashed with a metal rod. He was tied to a chair and beaten. He was tied upside down by his feet and beaten. His head was smashed through a wall.”
Tait admitted that Fellenbaum frequently beat her children, hitting them with a closed fist in the head, chest, and buttocks. She said, on at least one occasion, he strung the boys up by their feet and beat them, while she and Fellenbaum laughed. It was determined that Scotty died of blunt force trauma after suffering days without medical attention for his internal injuries.
Sadly, Tait’s 6-year-old son, who now lives with his adoptive parents, not only suffered the abuse along with Scotty, but he also witnessed his little brother’s death. “Dear Mom,” he wrote in a letter that was read in court at Tait’s sentencing. “You, Gary, and Amber were trapped in a house of torture. The torture was you guys. The victims were me and Scotty. Scotty got killed. I got beaten.”
