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Sugar Cookie

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The man suspected of murdering a two-year-old Norman child has been found dead.

Christopher James Trent, 38, was found dead in the Wichita Mountain Wildlife Refuge, Norman police said in a Facebook update posted Saturday morning.

How Trent died has not been revealed by authorities.

Norman police were called to the 700 block of Vicksburg Avenue on Wednesday to check on the welfare of a 2-year-old boy.

Police discovered that the child had suffered extensive physical trauma.

“Right off the back as medical personnel began to look at the child, they began to recognize that there was some significant abuse and physical trauma to the child,” said Sarah Jensen, Norman Police Public Information Officer.

The boy was later pronounced dead at a local hospital. Police investigated the boy's death and learned he had been in the care of Trent, who was dating his mother.
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Ooooooo was he eaten?
Torn to ribbons?
Dismembered?
Raped to death by a bear?
Fisted by Bigfoot?
All of the above?

Not that "wild" of a wildlife area. Def no bears or likely even mountain lions out there. Still a pretty area, and not just in a "compared to nearly everything else within 200 miles of it cuz youre in disgusting trash western Oklahoma" type of way. This area is RIGHT outside Lawton, which is one of the most disgusting cities in all of America. There's some buffalo and things of that nature, but it's hardly some secluded, far off deep in the wilderness type of area.

One of the greatest burgers I've ever had was at this very cool place in Meers, Ok, right in this same area. If you ever have the misfortune of being in that area of the country for some inexplicable, bizarre reason, strongly recommend.

Anyways, he prob just found a pretty spot and shot himself in the head there, real peaceful and tranquil like. Scumbag filth.
 
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According to Norman police, the child's mother found him New Years Day, quote "cold, blue and not breathing."

They found a large hole in the master bedroom with what appeared to be the child’s hair inside.

The boy had bruises and other injuries on his face and head, along with "serious injuries" on his back.

She told police the boy was fine before she went to bed and that Trent, her boyfriend, was gone when she woke up.

The mother also said her child had been bruised over the last month while under Trent’s care.
 
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Another mother that knew her child was being injured while in the care of her boyfriend and she continued to leave the child with him.

Nothing will happen to this woman and people will tell her she is the victim - but she is not Jeremiah was the victim of a selfish mother.
 
Charges have been filed against an Oklahoma mother in connection to the death of her 2-year-old son.

According to court documents, Rebecca Hogue has been charged with one count of first-degree murder by permitting child abuse in connection with the death of 2-year-old Jeremiah Johnson.

Officials say the toddler suffered a series of injuries at the hands of Hogue’s boyfriend, 38-year-old Christopher James Trent.

Trent had claimed that the boy fell down the stairs and suffered a number of minor injuries.

On Jan. 1, Hogue returned home from work to find Trent and Johnson asleep.

“And believed that the child was still alive at that time. Then when she woke at about 11 a.m. the next morning, that’s when she contacted us in regards to the welfare check,” Sarah Jensen, with the Norman Police Department, told KFOR.

Jeremiah was unresponsive and turning blue. After being rushed to the hospital, doctors noticed several other injuries to the child.

“Multiple contusions on his face and head. Bruises on a number of areas on his body,” Jensen said.

Six months after the child’s death, officials say charges have been filed in the case.

Court documents indicate that Hogue was charged in Cleveland County District Court with first-degree murder by permitting child abuse.
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A Cleveland County judge has found enough evidence for an Oklahoma mother accused of murder to go to trial.

The judge made his decision during a preliminary hearing at the Cleveland County Courthouse on Thursday.

This comes seven months after Rebecca Houge’s two-year-old son Jeremiah Johnson was found unresponsive inside his Norman home.

A number of injuries were later identified at the hospital.

Police identified Hogue’s boyfriend – Chrisopher Trent – as a suspect and began a statewide search.

That night, Trent’s vehicle was found parked at the Wichita Mountain Wildlife Refuge. Trent’s body was later found hanging from a tree.

Then last month, Hogue was charged with murder in connection to the child’s death.

During Thursday’s preliminary hearing, Hogue’s mother testified, saying she regularly babysat Johnson and was around Hogue and Trent.

She said she had previously seen Trent swat at the child’s hand and told him not to do that.

She also said she and Hogue never physically punished Johnson.

Hogue’s mother told a prosecutor, “Since they can’t do anything to Chris, they’re trying to throw my daughter under the bus. They don’t know her like I do.”

Norman officers who responded to Hogue’s 911 call also took the stand, detailing their recollection of the day.

One officer said Hogue had asked for help.

He said Hogue told him that the child had been acting strange for a few days and even threw up.

A prosecutor also said Hogue had researched signs of child abuse.

Hogue has been charged with one count of first-degree murder by permitting child abuse in connection with her son’s murder.

She’s being held on a $1 million bond.
 
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Sugar Cookie said:
The boy was later pronounced dead at a local hospital
Fucking hell.

Another mother that knew her child was being injured while in the care of her boyfriend and she continued to leave the child with him.
This.

A Cleveland County judge has found enough evidence for an Oklahoma mother accused of murder to go to trial.
Good.

Trent’s body was later found hanging from a tree.
Acceptable.
 
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An Oklahoma mother accused of the death of her child is now going before a judge and jury.

Jury selection happened Monday inside a Cleveland County courtroom for the trial against Rebecca Hogue.

Prosecutors allege she failed to protect her 2-year-old son, Jeremiah Johnson, from her boyfriend, Christopher Trent, who was caring for the child when he suffered those fatal injuries in January of 2020.

Trent was the subject of a manhunt following the child’s death but was found dead at the Wichita Mountain Wildlife Refuge. He hung himself before he could face charges.

Prosecutors argued Hogue didn’t kill Jeremiah, but she knew it was happening and reportedly did nothing to stop it.

“The Oklahoma law holds that mother responsible for whatever acts the person who she’s with causes to her child,” said Irven Box.

Box is not representing Hogue but offers insight on Oklahoma’s Failure to Protect law.

The law treats those who allegedly enable child abuse the same as actual abusers.

“I think it’s a good law. I think it’s a law that protects the child, and I think more parents and young parents ought to be aware of it,” said Box.
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I'd like to slap the people who donated to this bullshit gofundme

$3,105 raised of $20,000 goal​

On January 1st, 2020, Rebecca Hogue lost her beautiful baby boy Ryder. Her boyfriend killed him while she was at work making money for her and her son. He then fled and killed himself three days later.

Cleveland County is trying to charge her for first-degree murder.

Anyone that knows her can tell you that she loved her little boy more than anything in the world.

She has courageously turned herself in and is currently housed in the Cleveland County jail as she mourns for her child and waits for trial.

On July 14th, Rebecca had a bond hearing. The judge set her bail at $1,000,000. Oklahoma law requires that you only need to pay 10%, which is why we need $100,000 and quickly.

The quicker we get money to bail her out, the quicker we can ensure she is safe and not sitting in a jail cell until her trial date.

Becca is an incredible person who does not deserve any of this. Whether it be $1 or $1,000, anything will help us get her out of there.

This is yet another terrible incident of our justice system unfairly prosecuting women for someone else’s crimes under a sexist assumption that women alone are responsible for children.

It is important to add that if we do not meet our goal for bail, the money will still be used to pay experts to aid her in her trial. Her attorney is graciously doing this pro bono, however expert fees can get expensive. These experts will be people specializing in domestic violence and can help explain her behavior as she was a victim herself.
 
The killer animal might not have been the boy’s own dog of any breed, and not a black bear, either, as the social media rumor mill amplified.
I choked on my tea .. what's interesting is dad didn't come home for dinner, didn't answer any of the family's calls .. yet found the body!? Sounds suspicious!! Sounds a hell of a lot more plausible than a dog between 11 to 30 lbs and 14 inches tall .. it's not a bear .. that would be a perfect dinner for one .. no mention of common bear activity and a bear would have drug it off and hid it by burying it .. family and dad look suspicious .. at least it's not Summer Wells again .. we have a body ..
 
Her toddler son was killed by her boyfriend and now a Norman woman faces up to life in prison without the possibility of parole after a jury Wednesday found her guilty of murder.

Following an 8-day trial, Rebecca Latane Hogue, 30, was found guilty of first-degree murder by permitting child abuse.

In June 2020, the state's multicounty grand jury alleged Hogue was to blame for the beating death of Jeremiah Ryder Johnson because she left him in the care of her boyfriend, Christopher James Trent.

Grand jurors alleged she knew or reasonably should have known her son was at risk of abuse or neglect in her boyfriend's care.

Abby Nathan, assistant district attorney for Cleveland, Garvin, and McClain Counties, showed the jury disturbing photos of the injured boy and argued that Hogue should have known he was abused by Trent, with whom she had a troubled romantic relationship.

"She wasn't deceived, she forgave," Nathan said during closing arguments. "She wasn't deceived, she let it go. She wasn't deceived, she let him stay."

Nathan told jurors Hogue took photos of her son's injuries and asked Trent for explanations.

Trent often said the boy was injured because he was active. He once told Hogue the boy fell down stairs after getting out of bed.

Hogue let her son's injuries and suspicions about Trent "build over and over and over again," Nathan told the jury.

Supporters of Hogue claim she was unfairly prosecuted for a crime she didn't commit.

Under Oklahoma's so-called "failure to protect" laws, enabling child abuse is a felony that can carry the same punishments as child abuse — up to life in prison.

Critics of the law say it unfairly punishes domestic violence victims who sometimes are afraid or unable to seek help.

During closing arguments, defense attorney Andrew Casey told jurors Trent cut off communication with Hogue after she told him her son was dead.

Hogue texted Trent "I need you please," Casey told the jury.

"Does that sound like somebody who thinks he killed her child?" Casey said.

Casey showed photos of the boy with typical bruises from play before Trent came into his life. Casey also showed photos of the boy and Trent spending time together.

Trent used a social media app to video chat with Hogue shortly before her son died. The child was in the video.

Casey argued that Trent "gaslit" Hogue into believing everything was normal, even as her son was succumbing to his injuries.

He told the jury: "It was a race against time, and she lost."
 
In the early hours of New Year's Day 2020, Rebecca Hogue came home from a 12-hour shift at the Oklahoma casino where she worked as a cocktail waitress, crawled into bed next to her 2-year-old son Ryder, and her boyfriend, and drifted off to sleep.

The next morning, she woke to find that Ryder wasn't breathing. Her boyfriend, Christopher Trent, was at work. She called the police and panicked.

Bodycam footage of that day from emergency responders shows her trying in vain to perform CPR on her son, who was pronounced dead when he arrived at hospital.

A coroner's report later concluded that his cause of death was blunt-force trauma, and evidence from the home Hogue shared with Trent showed strands of Ryder's hair were found in the drywall.

Hogue says she didn't know any of that then. She called Trent, begging him to meet her at the hospital.

But he wouldn't respond to her texts or voice messages.

Four days later, police found Trent's body in the Wichita Mountains. He had died by an apparent suicide. A prosecutor would later make clear it was known that Trent had killed Ryder.

Carved into a tree near the site where his body was found were these words: Rebecca is innocent.

But with Trent dead, the investigation turned to the 29-year-old Hogue, who was charged with first-degree murder. In Oklahoma, parents who fail to protect their children from child abuse can be charged with the same crimes as the actual abuser.

"Failure to protect" laws, which exist in many US states, have drawn criticism from domestic violence experts who say in practice, they often criminalise victims of domestic abuse who may be too scared to leave.

Hogue's case has drawn significant attention from media and women's rights groups, and raises questions about the lasting wounds of trauma, as well as the limitations of the law to bring justice for the victims of abuse.

Hogue's trial took place in autumn last year. To convince a jury that she was guilty, the state needed to prove she knew about the abuse and didn't do anything about it.

Hogue says she had no idea Trent was abusing Ryder before that day, though not long before his death, she had begun to notice the boy had minor unexplained injuries.

Two weeks before Ryder died, Hogue noticed bruises and cuts on his body, she told police. She took photos, and began searching on her phone for warning signs that a child might be being abused.

But when she confronted Trent about it, he told her that boys get "nicks and bruises", according to police interviews.

Two days before Ryder's death, while giving him a bath, Hogue noticed her son was lethargic. She again confronted Trent, who suggested that Ryder must have had the flu.

Hogue later told police she searched online for symptoms of the flu, and also for signs of how a child might act if they were being abused. She said she searched for those things because "she attracts those kinds of men".

The state says her searches prove she knew Trent was abusing her child, but she forgave him.

Hogue says she searched because she was cautious, but ultimately believed Trent's explanations for the injuries.

"She said she fell for it again because he manipulated her," the police report reads.

Prosecutors say those initial suspicions about his injuries - and the fact that she continued to allow Trent to babysit - are proof that Hogue was guilty of "permitting her child to be murdered".

Several pieces of evidence were not allowed into trial, which Hogue's pro-bono attorney Andrew Casey believes could have helped her case.

The tree-carving with the words "Rebecca is innocent" was considered hearsay, and a ban was placed on distributing those images.

The lead detective who investigated the murder was not allowed to give his opinion on the merits of the case, and an audio recording that captured him discussing it with a friend of Hogue was not allowed into court.

On the recording, obtained by the BBC, he admits that his team looked into the question of whether to lay charges and decided they did not have enough evidence for a "failure to protect" first-degree murder charge.

"We don't believe in this charge and there's a good chance she ends up in prison anyway because of the way the system is," Detective Sean Judy can be heard saying on the recording.

The candid conversation was first reported on by the Norman Transcript, a local newspaper.

Mr Judy and the Norman Police Department declined to comment to the Norman Transcript and the police department did not respond to the BBC's request for comment.

The district attorney's office chose to bypass police charges by asking a jury to ask a jury to decide if charges should be brought, which is allowed in some American jurisdictions, rather than bringing police charges. Ultimately, the jury decided charges were warranted.

And finally, the jury were not allowed to hear expert testimony about Hogue's previous experiences with domestic violence and how it could affect her, because she was not the one being physically abused by Trent.

Over the eight-day trial, prosecutors repeatedly showed graphic images of Ryder's dead body covered in bruises, including leaving a picture of his bruised genitals up for 10 minutes during closing arguments.

It took the jury less than two hours to convict.
Speaking to the BBC from prison, where she awaits sentencing on Friday, Hogue says she keeps playing those brutal images over and over in her head.

"The things they said in trial, they haunt me," Hogue told the BBC from the Cleveland County Detention Centre in Oklahoma.

Growing up an only child, Hogue didn't know what it was like to be around little children until she gave birth to one, she says. She was overwhelmed by how much she loved him, and she still calls him her "best friend".

"He already had a sense of humour at two and a half," she says, smiling at the memory.

With no prior criminal record, Hogue is now looking at the possibility of spending decades in prison. The state has the highest rate of female incarceration in the country.

The jury recommended life with parole only possible after 38 years, but the Oklahoma Department of Corrections said a deferred sentence, with no jail time and mandatory counselling, is more appropriate.

All this scares her. But what scares her the most is the idea that the tawdry glare of this courtroom drama will outshine the memories of her happy, loving boy.

"Ryder is getting lost in all this. That he's not being remembered," she says through tears, her eyes wide as a prairie sky.

"I don't know why this happened to us. I ask that all the time."

Hogue is not the only person to be held responsible for her partner's violence. A majority of US states have some law against failing to protect children from abuse, either as a criminal or civil offence. Sentences can range from mandatory counselling to years behind bars. In several states, including Oklahoma, it can carry a life sentence.

A 2014 Buzzfeed investigation found at least 28 cases in 11 states where mothers were sentenced to 10 years in prison or more.

Cindene Pezzell, legal director for the National Clearinghouse for the Defense of Battered Women, says that while these laws were crafted to protect children, in effect, they often punish victims of domestic abuse and separate families, causing further harm.

Ms Pezzell says survivors are criminalised because they don't call police, don't take their children to the doctor, or don't get out of a bad relationship. But the reality is that many domestic violence victims fear that those actions could lead to further retaliation, she says.

"All of those things, we can say 'yes that's what a protective parent would do'. But it could be because they're choosing between something very dangerous and something even more dangerous," she says.

Although there are no clear statistics on how many women across the country have been charged in such cases, or how many of them were also survivors of domestic abuse, Ms Pezzell says women are much more likely to be charged than men.

In Oklahoma, about 13% of confirmed child abuse incidents can be categorised as "failure to protect", according to the state's child welfare department. A report by the American Civil Liberties Union found that 93% of people convicted of this were women.

This is in part because women are more likely to be the primary caregivers of children, she says, but she also believes that society's expectations of motherhood have a part to play in this disparity.

"It's hard for people to believe that a mother might not know their child is being abused… but what standard are we holding their mothers to? I've seen cases where paediatricians don't see any signs of abuse, and then the child dies, and the mother is charged with failure to protect."

In some cases, the charge can lead to more jail time for the person who "failed" to stop the abuser.
During trial, the prosecution argued that Hogue does not deserve the sympathy of abuse victims, like Ms Hall, who stay with their partner out of fear.

They objected to the defence calling an expert on domestic violence to the stand, and the judge agreed with the prosecution.

"I want to be one hundred percent clear. Rebecca Hogue is not a domestic violence victim of Christopher Trent, who killed that baby," District Attorney Greg Mashburn told local news station KFOR. "She was not scared of him. She was not worried about what he would do physically to her."

Mr Mashhburn's office declined to speak to the BBC for this story.

But Stacey Wright, an anti-domestic-violence advocate on the board of the Oklahoma Call for Reproductive Justice advocacy group, says Trent's repeated lies about Ryder's injuries was gaslighting, a form of psychological abuse.

"That's the thing about abuse, is it alters your ability to trust your gut, and your intuition," she says.

While she does not deserve a life sentence she does need to be held accountable for failing her child.

The minute she has any thoughts he was darming her child she should have broken up with him.
 
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Rebecca Hogue was sentenced to 16 months in prison. 3 months have already been served, so she will spend the next 13 months in prison.

Rebecca Hogue was convicted of murder in November. The jury recommended she be sentenced to life in prison.
Hogue's son, Jeremiah, died in 2020. Hogue's boyfriend, Christopher Trent, was accused of the abuse that killed Jeremiah.

Trent was found dead by suicide.
Hogue was charged with murder under a statute in Oklahoma known as "Failure to Protect". The Cleveland County District Attorney claimed Hogue failed to protect her son for the abuse leading to his death.
https://okcfox.com/news/local/rebec...ce-sentencing-child-wichita-mountains-manhunt

Family and supporters of Rebecca Hogue spoke out after she was sentenced on Friday for the death of her two-year-old child.

Her sentence included 16 months in prison by a Cleveland County judge. Hogue was convicted this past November for the 2020 death of her 2-year-old son, Ryder Johnson.

"She's reliving that reliving that trauma every single day," said Andrew Casey, Hogue's Attorney. "Not just before trial, but through trial."

Investigators say Ryder was beaten to death by her then-boyfriend, Christopher Trent, who took his own life days later after a search team found him in the Wichita Mountains. Prosecutors said Hogue didn't do enough to protect Ryder and that's why she was convicted for murder under the state's failure-to-protect law.
However, supporters of Hogue tell News 9 they don't believe this was a fair trial and want the law changed moving forward.

"That law's wrong," said Laney Hogue Edwards, Hogue's Aunt. "It doesn't save children from getting abused, it actually stops mothers from talking about children being abused because they might end up in this courthouse."
According to DHS, Hogue knew about Trent's past violence, as he had been arrested for assault before. A judge says the sentence represents the remaining years that her son would have been in her care.

Hogue will be released in 13 months due to time served.
 
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