A man in France has been charged with murdering his son by shoving him in a washing machine and turning it on, AFP reports.
According to the Daily Mail, the incident was punishment for the child's behavior. The 3-year-old boy, Bastien, reportedly threw a classmate's drawing in a toilet at nursery school.
However, this wasn't the first time the child had been punished as such.
The French newspaper Le Parisien reports (translated from French):
Maud, Bastien's five-year-old sister, told Fidelio, the husband of a neighbor, that it wasn't the first time that her father put the little boy in the machine. Sometimes, he locked his son inside for two hours to punish him.
According to Le Parisien, the boy's grandmother called Bastien an "unwanted child." She reported that on the day of his birth, the boy's father, Christophe, was "drinking with his friends and told me he didn't want the child."
The toddler died of head injuries, the Daily Mail reports.
Police charged Bastien's father with "murder of a minor" in Meaux, France, according to AFP. Sky News quoted a local police spokesperson as saying, "The man's wife has also been arrested for non-assistance of a person in danger."