A man who tortured and sexually abused a three-year-old Independence old boy before he died has been given two consecutive life prison terms. Witnesses in Byron Griffin’s trial say the boy had been beaten with a ping-pong paddle, burned on the genitals with a hair dryer, was missing a tooth, suffered brain welling, that he was bleeding from most of his body orifices, and that his neck muscles were torn because he’d been picked up by the neck and shaken. The boy’s mother and father face separate chages in the case. Griffin was the mother’s boyfriend.
