An Ohio man was sentenced last week for killing his girlfriend two years ago and leaving her then-10-year-old son at home with the body while he occasionally brought the boy food.

Kandawaswika Kahari, 22, pleaded guilty last December to aggravated murder, felonious assault, and gross abuse of a corpse, WCMH reported. According to the Franklin County Prosecutors Office, Reynoldsburg Police found Susan Ramberg. 46, dead in her SUV, which was parked in the garage of her home, and her son home alone.

Kahari reportedly confessed to his parents weeks after the murder, and they contacted Reynoldsburg Police.

According to the prosecutor, Kahari and Ramberg got into an argument in the garage, and Kahari punched and choked her until she was unconsious but still alive. He brought her inside to the couch in the living room, but then choked her dead and had her son help him carry her out to the car, saying he was taking her to the hospital.

He didn’t. Eventually, the prosecutor said, he told the boy she was dead.

Kahari was also charged with hitting the boy with a small shovel and knocking him unconscious.

The victim’s family read a emotional statement to the court during the sentencing hearing, WSYX reported,

“He should never have to hug his dead mother, put her in the car with her murderer. He should never have to play dead while laying in his own blood so his mother‘s murderer will stop kicking him,” the family said. “He should never have been left alone in a house for 3 weeks where he knows his mother’s body is in the garage. He should never have to live in fear, wondering if and when he would be fed by a man who tried to kill him.”

Kahari was sentenced to 39 years to life.