Mom Murdered 4-Year Old Son Because He ‘Talked Like’ He Was Gay, Say Prosecutors

(From left) Jessica Dutro-Boggess and Brian Canady Photo: WCSO

An Oregon mother of four is on trial in Portland for the murder of her four-year old boy. Prosecutors says that Jessica Dutro complained on Facebook to her boyfriend that her son, Zachary, was gay, and beat him on several occasions because of it.

In the Facebook message to her boyfriend Brian Canady, which was read in court today, Jessica Dutro said that her son Zachary was “facing the wall” because he had made her mad, OregonLive reports:

Her son was going to be gay, she wrote, using a slur. “He walks and talks like it. Ugh.”

Canady would have to “work on” Zachary, she wrote.

On August 12, 2012, Canady allegedly violently kicked four-year old Zachary in the stomach. He reportedly refused to take the child to the hospital. When the boy finally was taken to the emergency room — two days later — it was too late. He was taken off life support August 16, 2012. The cause of death was blunt force trauma “to his abdomen that caused tears in his bowel,” OregonLive reported. Zachary “was covered in bumps and bruises,”


OregonLove notes in a separate report, “but he died from two holes in his intestines caused by blunt-force trauma. Urine and feces seeped from the holes and harmed his vital organs.”

Another report detailed 4-year old Zachary’s injuries.

Doctors concluded that abdominal trauma had caused the tears in Zachary’s gut. High-velocity car crashes or bike accidents could cause similar injuries, Leonhardt said. Otherwise, it takes forceful, violent kicking or stomping to cause such injuries, he testified.
Bruises were all over Zachary’s body. They suggested that the child had pulled himself into a fetal position to protect himself from a beating, the doctor said. The various injuries indicated he had been abused multiple times, Leonhardt said.
Old, dead tissue from a deep cut hung off of Zachary’s lip. Leonardt, a child abuse specialist at Randall Children’s Hospital and CARES Northwest, could not recall another case where a child had that injury.
“That thing would have bled a lot,” he said. “You just let this flap of lip hang there?”
The doctor said most children with such a wound would have been brought in for emergency care.

A previous report details Zachary’s seven-year old sister explaining how her little brother “got dead.”

“Jessica and Brian, they kept hitting him and punching him,” she said. “He didn’t listen to them so they kicked him and punched him and stuff and they kept doing it and doing it.”

Brian Canady has plead guilty to first-degree manslaughter and second-degree assault. Zachary’s mother, Jessica Dutro, is on trial for murder, murder by abuse, and second-degree assault.

Dutro, in addition to her late son Zachary, is the mother of a 3-year old boy, an infant, and the seven-year old girl who testified in court. Both the 3-year old and the 7-year old reportedly showed signs of physical abuse.

“Doctors told detectives that if the boy had received treatment for his injuries,” KOIN adds, ”he likely would have survived.”

(H/T:  The New Civil Rights Movement)