GUILTY FL - Blake Rupe, 15 mos, beaten to death, Tavares, Dec 2008

What should make you more queasy involves a Tavares baby dying after having his delicate little head whacked against a ceramic tile floor by an angry, muscled boyfriend-of-mom. Last week, that man was convicted of second-degree murder in the death of Blake Rupe, a 15-month-old baby whose brain swelled so badly after he was attacked in December 2008 that the retinas in his eyes hemorrhaged.

Typically, a journalist would call a child of Blake's age a "toddler" rather than a "baby." But Blake couldn't toddle, probably because the femur in one of his skinny legs was broken. Or maybe what kept him from walking was one of the five other broken bones the medical examiner found during the autopsy. After all, it would be kind of hard for the boy to push himself up when both of his arms had been broken during the previous 11 months.

When a child who can't even talk yet dies with six broken bones and a smashed skull, and his surviving 2½-year-old sister has three fractures in her left arm, the case seems an obvious one of torture. Consider that each and every time Blake turned up hurt, he was alone with David Tatara, the burly electrician who lived with Blake's mother.

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Emmalee Fore goes to sleep at night with a stuffed teddy bear. Pulled over its top is a sweater once belonging to her toddler son, Blake Rupe. "That's all I have left," she told Circuit Judge Mark Nacke this week before the sentencing of David Tatara, who was found guilty last month of second-degree murder in the death of Blake.

Tatara was sentenced at the Lake County Judicial Center to life in prison.

When Nacke handed down the sentence to Tatara, 30, for the December 2008 death of the 15-month-old, relatives of Blake seated in the courtroom let out a collective sigh of relief and briefly clapped. The small outburst came at the end of a tragedy that sparked an internal probe at the state Department of Children & Families. Two case workers and a supervisor involved with the family were fired in the aftermath.

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