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Autistic boy suffocated by 400-pound man during ‘fit’: cops

A nearly 400-pound man killed his autistic stepgrandson when he tried to restrain him during a “fit,” according to reports.

Donald Martin Jr., 58, of Ohio was nabbed Friday on charges of reckless homicide shortly after emergency responders were called to a Mount Orab residence because the 11-year-old victim stopped breathing, KTLA 5 reported.

The grandmother of victim Dylan Davis called 911 and told a dispatcher that “he came home and threw a fit,” according to the news outlet.

“Police came here all the time for him and he threw a fit. My husband was holding him down, he got sick and then he just passed out. I don’t know,” the grandmother said.

According to authorities, Martin, who weighs between 360 and 400 pounds, went after Davis after his wife and the boy got into an altercation.

“It appears that the 11-year-old was deceased as a result of positional asphyxiation or compression,” Brown County Sheriff Gordon Ellis said, according to WLWT 5.

“There was some type of altercation between the 11-year-old and his grandmother and the stepgrandfather stepped in and restrained the juvenile,” Ellis said.

Prosecutors say the boy was pinned down for several minutes.

The victim’s father, Sam, told WLWT 5: “I feel sad. I feel angry. I feel confused. I wish it never would have happened.”

Sam, who told the news outlet that his son was autistic, noted, “Sometimes his anger was getting stronger and sometimes he had to be physically restrained.”