The word “boot camp” usually calls up an image of pre-dawn runs and cold showers, a method for turning someone around when they’ve lost their way. It’s a phrase borrowed from military culture and dropped into civilian life with the implication that hard physical discipline produces results. What it almost certainly doesn’t call to mind is a four-year-old boy being struck 21 times across his bare skin with a belt. And yet that is exactly what the word was being used to describe in an Aurora, Colorado apartment in May 2026, according to court documents, before that same little boy was found unresponsive on a couch and rushed to a hospital, where he died.
The case has shaken people across the country, not just because of the severity of what was done to the child, but because of how it came to happen at all. This was not a stranger. This was not an accident buried in a moment of rage that spiraled beyond control in seconds. According to investigators, the boy’s own mother arranged it, described what she wanted, gave explicit permission, and drove away.
Two people are now facing serious criminal charges. The full picture that has emerged from court records is one that asks hard questions about how violence against children gets rationalized, passed off as discipline, and – most devastatingly – transferred from one adult to another like a set of instructions.
What Happened on East Tennessee Avenue
The investigation began around 10 p.m. on Saturday, May 16, when Aurora patrol officers and fire rescue paramedics responded to an apartment in the 14100 block of East Tennessee Avenue. Emergency callers reported a young child who was unconscious and not breathing. Medical personnel attempted life-saving measures and rushed the boy to a local hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
When officers arrived, 24-year-old Alexander Martinez-Armstrong was standing over the boy. An officer at the hospital reported that he was “shocked” to see the amount of bruising on the child and described his injuries as “vast.” Emergency personnel observed the child was covered in bruises “from head to toe,” including black and blue bruises to his face, that were in various stages of healing. The injuries weren’t just from that night. The bruises at different stages of healing told a story of something that had been happening across multiple days.
Alexander Martinez-Armstrong was taken into custody over the weekend and charged with one count of first-degree murder. Martinez-Armstrong was described as being the boy’s “godfather.”
What the Mother Told Police
The victim’s mother told police she intentionally dropped her son off with Martinez-Armstrong for a “boot camp” to correct “behavioral issues,” including repeatedly lying to her, sneaking into her purse, not listening to her, and occasionally sneaking candy.
Let that list settle for a moment. Sneaking candy. Not listening. Going into his mother’s purse. These are things that essentially every four-year-old does at some point, behaviors that pediatricians and child development specialists describe as completely typical for that age – a child who is learning where boundaries are precisely by crossing them. They are not symptoms of a child who needs correction by force. They are signs of a child who is four years old.
The mother described the suspect as being “like a brother” to her and admitted she gave him “full permission” to discipline the child using methods she routinely used herself, such as belt whippings, spankings, push-ups, planks, and wall sits. She admitted to “routinely” punishing her son by having him do wall sits, planks, pushups, running, and hitting him with a belt or an open hand. By her own account, the methods Martinez-Armstrong used were not something new he introduced. They were the methods she had normalized at home, then handed off to someone else to administer.
According to an affidavit, Martinez-Armstrong told investigators that he picked up the boy four days before the incident from his mother, and said the boy was at his house “on punishment for being bad, disruptive and not listening.”
What Happened Inside the Apartment
Martinez-Armstrong reportedly said the child was “on punishment for being bad, disruptive and not listening,” and acknowledged that he forced the child to perform push-ups until he physically collapsed, which likely caused the severe bruising to the boy’s face and forearms.
Martinez-Armstrong’s girlfriend told investigators she could hear the child’s screams from a different room as her boyfriend beat him. Martinez-Armstrong told one officer that the child “would cry during the whippings and say, ‘ow.'” He told officers that he’d respond by telling the boy, “I know it stings, I know, get up…” and asking if he was going to be “good.”
The suspect admitted that the day the boy died was the day he most heavily “disciplined” the 4-year-old, confessing to striking the boy’s bare skin with the belt at least 21 times.
Investigators processing the apartment found a belt with a broken prong on the kitchen counter near papers with childlike handwriting, where the suspect had been forcing the boy to practice numbers. The image of those papers alongside the broken belt is almost unbearably specific. Someone had the child sitting at a table, working on his numbers, and hitting him when he got things wrong or misbehaved. It looked, from the outside, like a structured environment. The structure was the point.
The last time Martinez-Armstrong allegedly whipped the child was right before dinner, at about 9:30 p.m. He gave the boy food, the child ate only one bite, put his head on the table, and appeared to be falling asleep. Martinez-Armstrong walked him to the couch where he fell asleep with a blanket. The child later fell completely unresponsive on the couch. When Martinez-Armstrong checked on him, he found the boy was not breathing. The suspect’s girlfriend immediately called 911 while Martinez-Armstrong attempted CPR until paramedics arrived.
The Charges and the Arrests
A spokesperson for the Office of the 18th Judicial District Attorney confirmed that Alexander Martinez-Armstrong is now facing charges of first-degree murder and child abuse knowingly or recklessly causing death. He is being held without bond at the Arapahoe County Detention Center. His next court date is scheduled for July 17.
Destini Rose Lipsky, 23, of Aurora, was arrested in Colorado Springs and faces charges of child abuse resulting in death, police spokesperson Agent Kristopher McDowell said in a statement. Lipsky was arrested in El Paso County, some 80 miles south of Arapahoe County, where Martinez-Armstrong was arrested. She was held on $500,000 bond at the El Paso County Jail pending her transfer to Arapahoe County.
Police said additional interviews and evidence collected during the investigation led detectives to seek an arrest warrant for Lipsky. Aurora Major Crime Homicide Unit detectives, assisted by Aurora and Colorado Springs fugitive teams, arrested her Thursday. The investigation remains active, and the final cause and manner of death are pending an official release from the Arapahoe County Coroner’s Office.
The boy, identified in some reports as Xander, was four years old.
Child Abuse Deaths in the United States
Cases like this one exist within a broader and devastating national picture. In 2024, an estimated 1,773 children died from abuse and neglect in the United States, according to the National Children’s Alliance, a number which had peaked in 2022. That works out to roughly five children every single day.
Data from the American SPCC shows that 81.5% of child fatalities involve at least one parent. The danger to young children most often comes not from strangers but from the people they depend on entirely, the people they have no way to leave or resist. 66.9% of all child fatalities involve children younger than three years old. Young children’s bodies are more fragile, their voices carry less weight, and they are almost entirely without recourse when the adults around them cause harm.
This case is striking not because it is unfamiliar but because of its deliberateness. This wasn’t a loss of control in a single moment. By the accounts given to investigators, the child’s suffering unfolded over multiple days, known to more than one adult in that apartment. The child abuse death that resulted was the endpoint of a chain of decisions, not a sudden rupture.
The Language of Discipline
The language in this case is familiar, and that familiarity is part of what makes it so difficult to sit with. “Boot camp.” “Behavioral issues.” “Full permission.” These are words and phrases that sound, on the surface, like the vocabulary of parenting. Someone trying to correct a child who wasn’t listening. Someone asking for help with a kid who was getting out of hand.
That vocabulary is exactly what allowed the arrangement to be made without apparent alarm. The American Academy of Pediatrics has been unequivocal for years: all forms of corporal punishment, including hitting children as a form of discipline, are at best minimally effective in the short term and entirely ineffective long-term, with researchers linking physical punishment to increased aggression, defiance, and harm to the parent-child relationship. Striking a child produces more defiance, not less. The methods Lipsky normalized at home, and then handed to Martinez-Armstrong to administer, were not working. They were never going to work. They were just causing pain.
The distance between “we believe in discipline” and a four-year-old being struck 21 times with a belt is shorter than most people want to believe, when hitting is treated as a normal, accepted tool. The child reportedly cried out during the whippings. He ate one bite of dinner. Then he fell asleep. Then he didn’t wake up.
What This Actually Means
Cases like this one are hard to put down because they resist the instinct to find something monstrous and alien in the details. The words used here are ordinary: discipline, behavior, permission, punishment. A mother who thought her son needed to be corrected. A man who took that correction further than any child can survive. And now a boy is dead, two adults are sitting in separate county jails awaiting trial, and the Arapahoe County Coroner’s Office is still preparing its official findings.
The boy’s name was Xander. He was four years old and he sneaked candy. His mother thought he needed to be corrected. His godfather thought he needed to be corrected harder. The facts of this case, laid out plainly, put pressure on the belief that hitting a child is a form of care – because the same logic that produces a light spanking, when it goes unchallenged and is handed to someone else to enforce, can produce this. That is not a comfortable thought. It is not supposed to be.