Pittsburgh mom goes to prison for beating son with belt

PITTSBURGH (AP) — A Pittsburgh woman has been sentenced to six to 12 years in state prison for beating her 12-year-old son so severely with a belt that he needed a skin graft and painkillers during a two-week hospital stay.

Judge Randal Todd of Allegheny County Common Pleas Court imposed the sentence today despite a plea for no prison time from the son of 30-year-old Sharron Watson. Her boyfriend is serving five to 15 years in prison for his role in the beating in January 2008. He ground his work boot into the open wound on the boy’s buttocks.

The judge told the boy, now 14, that he didn’t imprison the woman “because of anything you did. You did nothing wrong.”

Christopher Hoffman, an assistant county district attorney, says, “What happened in that house was akin to torture.”