Macclesfield, N.C. — Callers to 911 seeking help for a 13-year-old boy who authorities have said was tied to a tree for two nights did not answer a dispatcher when asked what the teen was doing before he stopped breathing.

That's according to a 911 call released Tuesday that begins with a woman telling the dispatcher: "Our little boy stopped breathing."

The dispatcher repeatedly asks the woman, and later a man, what the child had been doing before he stopped breathing. Neither responded. The man said the boy did not have any medical problems.

Tyler McMillan later died at a local hospital.

Prosecutors have charged his parents – Brice Brian McMillan, 41, and Sandra Elizabeth McMillan, 36, with murder and felony child abuse.

Brice McMillan told Edgecombe County deputies he tied his son to a tree last Tuesday as a punishment for disobedience, Sheriff James Knight said.

He untied him Wednesday morning and then tied him for a second time Wednesday night when the boy started misbehaving again. Sandra McMillan, the boy's stepmother, found him unconscious at about 4:30 p.m. Thursday.

According to arrest warrants read during their first court appearance on Monday, Tyler had bruises on his wrists, cuts on his body and flesh missing from his buttocks.

Authorities have said his wrists and ankles were bound with plastic wrap and that he was also tied to the tree with some other material.