Mom Kills 4 Yr Old Son She Was Afraid He Was Gay
Jessica Dutro
WASHINGTON COUNTY SHERIFF’S OFFICE
A 7-year-old girl told a Tigard detective how her little brother, Zachary Dutro-Boggess, “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.”
The girl was talking about her mother, Jessica Dutro, and her mother’s boyfriend, Brian Canady. Washington County jurors listened to a recording of the girl’s interview with police Tuesday during Dutro’s murder trial.
Dutro is charged with seven counts including murder, murder by abuse and second-degree assault. Canady pleaded guilty to first-degree manslaughter for his role in the 4-year-old boy’s death earlier this month.
Dutro’s 7-year-old daughter said the couple routinely hit her and her siblings for “not being good.”
She recounted a time when Zachary was in trouble again.
“They kept hitting and hitting him because he wasn’t listening,” she said.
He got sick after that, she said. After a while, he made soft groaning sounds. Eventually, he stopped breathing.
Dutro and Canady knew Zachary was sick, she said. “But they didn’t tell anybody.”
On the morning of Aug. 14, 2012, the couple did call for help. Zachary was unresponsive. Dutro told police that he didn’t wake up when she roused him and his three siblings.
She put him in the shower because he had wet the bed, Dutro said. His body was limp, his head and eyes rolled.
Dr. Danny Leonhardt testified Tuesday that the boy was beyond help by the time help arrived. Zachary was taken off life support Aug. 16, 2012.
“We didn’t see him until he essentially was dead,” the doctor said. “We didn’t get a chance to fix him.”
Zachary’s bowel was torn in two places. The contents of his intestines had leaked out into his body for at least two days, Leonhardt said. The resulting shock and infection killed Zachary.
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.
Doctors tried to save Zachary, Leonhardt said, but the damage was too great. As he was working on the child’s case, Leonhardt said, he ran into Zachary’s aunt and younger brother in the hospital. The 3-year-old’s face was covered in bruises, he said.
Leonhardt also evaluated Zachary’s siblings. He diagnosed all of Dutro’s children with child abuse except for the youngest, Dutro’s and Canady’s infant son.
Zachary’s 3-year-old brother, the doctor said, had five broken ribs. The fractures showed at least two different stages of healing, indicating multiple instances of abuse.
Zachary’s 7-year-old sister, he said, had extensive bruising on her back, chest, buttocks and hip.
View full size(From left) Jessica Dutro and Brian Canady
When Leonhardt informed Dutro of his diagnosis, he said, she became “very angry, very upset.”
She was mad at the doctors, he said, for not telling her and Canady sooner about the details of Zachary’s injuries. They’d already talked to police. They’d been made to look like idiots, he recalled her saying.
Leonhardt wrote down the mother's words. He'd never heard them before. She reportedly told the doctor “had they been made aware, they would have been able to talk to each other and get their story straight.”
— Emily E. Smith
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