Her boyfriend killed her son but she went to jail

[Jilly_in_VA]

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.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-60326621
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This is so wrong!!!

[MagickMuffin]

1. If Rebecca Hogue was at work when the assault took place then

How could she have killed her son?

Hopefully this will be cleared up and Rebecca Hogue is found innocent.

[Jilly_in_VA]

2. It's the "failure to protect" thing

that they hung her on. Oklahoma is a barbaric place.

[WhiskeyGrinder]

3. Centering punishment in our "justice" system gets us to this place.

[Wingus Dingus]

4. I don't know what sentence--if any--would be fair, but

finding your child with cuts and bruises, lethargic, etc. after leaving him alone for 12 hour shifts with what was basically some dude she hadn't known very long who also wasn't the boy's father...yes, she failed to protect her child and she does bear some responsibility for his death. I don't think she deserves decades in jail, as if she murdered the boy herself, but there must be some legal consequences for failing to act, failing to take him to the doctor when he was lethargic during a bath (and note she "confronted" the boyfriend about the baby's altered mental state--so she suspected him of having done something--and STILL left her baby in this guy's care for 12-plus hours two days later).

[SharonClark]

5. Well said.

[Hestia]

6. What's really egregious about this is the Prosecuting Atty stating that she wasn't abused and

that she should have known better, as if he knows what it is like to be a low socio-economic single mother who's doing the best she can. She was very leery of him at first, even having her friends come on the first day and vet him.

It's the man-splainin' of what domestic abuse is and isn't and doesn't see anything wrong with the laws as written.

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.

Looking back, Hogue wonders if he was "love bombing" her - a technique domestic-violence experts say abusers use in the beginning of a relationship to shower their victims with affection, building trust and dependence.

Ms Pezzell says physical violence isn't the only form of abuse, and that it's quite common for women who have left physically abusive relationships to become targets for coercive, psychological abuse by future partners.

"Victims are often assumed to choose their partners, but their partners very strategically choose the most vulnerable victims," she says.

And Okla women are dying via suicide/alcoholism - https://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2016/04/08/we-dont-know-why-it-came-to-this/

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2018/11/16/alcohol-deaths-emergency-room-increase-middle-aged-women-addiction-opioids/1593347002/

One alarming statistic: Deaths among women rose 85 percent. Women once drank far less than men, and their more moderate drinking helped prevent heart disease, offsetting some of the harm.