A Texas father is in police custody after he told 911 operators he carved a large pentagram in his six-year old son’s back because today, December 12, 2012 is a “holy day,” marked by the numbers 12-12-12.
“I shed some innocent blood,” Brent Troy Bartel, 39, says to police in the audio recording of his 911 call, below.
“What do you mean, sir?” the 911 operator asks, as David Edwards at the Raw Story reports:
“I inscribed a pentagram on my son,” the man explains.
“Why did you do that?” the operator presses.
“Because it’s a holy day,” the caller replies before hanging up.
Officers dispatched to Bartel’s home discovered the 6-year-old boy shivering without a shirt.
“There was a large pentagram carved into his back which covered the majority of his back,” a news release from Richland Hills police Sgt. Nathan Stringer said. “The child was found cold and shivering in the cold so officers wrapped him in a jacket.”
Investigators later confiscated a box cutter, which they suspected was used to carve the religious symbol.
“The father’s call to 911 was placed at 12:10 a.m., just minutes after the day 12-12-12 began,” writes NBC News. “[However] the date is not known to have any holy or religious significance.”
Nonetheless, the news agency notes that the date, along with 12-12-12, has “drawn attention from numerologists and those concerned with doomsday prophecy.”
