The father of a 15-year-old boy and the man's live-in girlfriend were indicted Monday on charges of attempted murder for allegedly abusing and starving the teen for 17 months.
Yasunobu Karasuno, 40, a truck driver in Kishiwada, Osaka Prefecture, and his girlfriend, Natsuyo Kawaguchi, 38, allegedly beat the boy frequently and stopped giving him adequate meals beginning around June 2002. The teen fell into a coma last November and remains unconscious, prosecutors said.
They said the couple admitted to the charges. They quoted the couple as saying the boy was a nuisance.
"We did it," Kawaguchi reportedly told interrogators, saying that disciplining the boy escalated into abuse.
The pair was also quoted as saying they planned to kill the boy to keep the authorities from finding out they had abused him.
They are suspected of only feeding the boy every three to seven days. The prosecutors said they believe the couple intended to kill the boy by starving him to death.
They also concluded the two allegedly arranged not to contradict each other on a story that the junior high school student was suffering from anorexia.
Prosecutors said the continued abuse pushed the boy to become mentally deranged. They quoted the pair as saying he even ate his own feces.
The police said the boy became unable to stand on his own in September. When he was hospitalized two months later, he had symptoms of hypoglycemia and brain atrophy caused by starvation.