MMA fighter let daughter starve to death in house full of food while he binged on drugs, video games
A former super heavyweight MMA fighter let his 5-year-old daughter starve to death in a locked room — and kept his 3-year-old son wasting away in a cage — while he binged on drugs and video games in a house stocked with food, authorities said.
Robert Buskey of Schenectady, NY, imprisoned little Charlotte in a bedroom locked from the outside, prosecutors said.
She died of thirst and hunger, curled up in a portable playpen meant for a smaller child, authorities said. It’s unclear how long Charlotte suffered.
Both children tested positive for cocaine.
Now Buskey, 35, is facing 27 years in prison after he pleaded guilty Jan. 23 to second-degree murder.
Charlotte was found on April 14, 2024, “so dehydrated that her eyes were sunken into her skull and her body completely emaciated,” the Schenectady County District Attorney said.
An autopsy revealed her body was completely devoid of food, though the home was “stocked with food, including boxes of food right outside of her locked bedroom,” according to prosecutors.
Busky even reinforced the lock on the door with tape after he discovered Charlotte was able to escape by jiggling the door.
His son Jackson was also found to be in a severe state of malnutrition.
Buskey was once a promising amateur MMA super heavyweight who had a 3-1 record in bouts from 2015 to 2022 — winning his last three fights with first round knockouts.
A former coach of Buskey said he gave up the ring for drugs.
“There’s definitely two different people,” the MMA coach, who declined to be identified, told The Post. “The person that we knew and then the person that, after they left, the person they became.”
“I used to reach out every so often to go get help,” the coach said of his ill-fated attempts to get Buskey sober. “It was brushed off as I was a ‘boring person.’”
The depraved dad had custody of his kids because their mom was in drug rehab, the MMA coach claimed.
His fighting prowess has not helped him while locked up in county jail, where other inmates discovered his sick crimes.
“They found out what he did and he caught a couple of beatings over it,” the coach claimed.
A lawyer for Buskey could not be reached for comment.
