Why is there so much drug addiction in Utah? With singular and disturbing regularity, we read about truly awful crimes, usually against children, committed by Utes while under the influence of hard narcotics.
Today’s wretched story is about a Utah mother who reportedly stood by passively while her bespectacled 4-year-old son (Hell! This kid could have been me!) was brutalized and ultimately killed by his stepfather to be, a man named Nathan Sloop who both sides agree was suffering from mental illness.
Nina Golgowski writes for the Daily News:
A Utah woman sobbed before a judge Monday while taking full responsibility for the beastly murder of her 4-year-old son.
Stephanie Sloop, whose tiny son Ethan was repeatedly burned and beaten before his disfigured body was tossed into a shallow grave in 2010, pleaded guilty to his murder while telling a Farmington judge: “I am entirely responsible because I was his mommy.”
Crime followers are not going to feel much sympathy for Stephanie Sloop and it’s not hard to understand why.
Expressing real remorse when it’s too late doesn’t do a damned bit of good for the victim child, but it does suggest that Stephanie does have at least somewhat of a heart which means she’s going to spend the rest of her life (most or all of which will be spent in prison), regretting her lethal passivity.
Stephanie pleaded guilty to first-degree felony aggravated murder and second-degree felony obstructing justice. Her sentences will run concurrently and she will serve 20 years to life (and I suspect that given the heinous nature of the crime, it will be at least 30 years before she gets out and then only if she can convince the parole board that she has redeemed herself).
In a statement before the Court, Ms. Sloop said:
“I had an obligation and a responsibility as his mother to take care of him and protect him and I failed horribly. My selfish behavior is the reason I am standing here today pleading guilty to these charges.”
This case is an excellent example of the very real dangers of exposing your helpless child to a new boyfriend/lover (once again I use the word loosely), particularly when drugs and mental illness are involved. Shockingly, according to the Deseret News, “it was only a little more than a week after the bespectacled child was sent from Virginia to live with Sloop and his soon-to-be stepfather, Nathan Sloop, that the physical abuse began.”
Ugh! I can just see Nathan’s eyes lighting up with dark joy at the sight of the little boy.
According to the reports, the abuse consisted primarily of scalding the child with hot water, beating him and over-medicating him before he succumbed to the injuries and expired on May 8, 2010. The abuse reportedly lasted for 10 days.
Once little Ethan was dead, the criminals apparently “disfigured his corpse by burning it and bashing it with a hammer”, presumably to disguise the damage. Then, as a final insult, Ethan was buried in a shallow grave with dog food sprinkled atop it.
The one thing that could play in Stephanie Sloop’s favor is the fact that – according to the prosecutors – Nathan Sloop was the one to actually carry out the abuse on the child while Stephanie stood passively by. (This bridges the delicate issue of personal responsibility when confronted by the evil of others – a very tricky topic indeed. The need to protect your own child from harm perpetrated by others is, however, patently obvious.)
Ms. Sloop’s attorney’s theory of the case is that Nathan Sloop was jealous of little Ethan “and that he took advantage of her while she was abusing medications.”
Well fine, Nathan was jealous of Ethan. This would perhaps be a more viable argument if there was evidence that Ms. Sloop was showering Ethan with love and affection and ignoring “poor” Nathan. This hardly seems to be the case, though, considering that Stephanie was apparently stoned out of her gourd while all this was going on.
Ms. Sloop continues in her prepared statement:
“Aside from my selfishness, my addiction to prescription medication and failure to get help paved the way for this tragedy. I failed to recognized the signs, or rather, I just out-and-out ignored them, doing what I wanted to, like always. My selfishness wouldn’t let me accept that I had ‘a problem,’ let alone let another else try to help me.”
Once again, this is all well and good but a great many people have drug or alcohol problems and do not stand passively by while their deranged boyfriend/husband systematically brutalizes and ultimately kills their child. There has to be more to this and I wonder who made the decision to send Ethan out to Utah from wherever he was staying in Virginia.
The added wrinkle to the story is that Nathan Sloop, who faced the same charges as Ms. Sloop, pleaded guilty to aggravated murder in February with the added caveat that he was mentally ill.
“He also pleaded guilty, while mentally ill, to second-degree felony aggravated assault for attacking a Davis County jail officer,” the Deseret News reported.
Nathan Sloop was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison for Ethan’s murder and one to 15 years for the aggravated assault.
Although I believe that mental illness should normally be considered to be a mitigating factor in cases like these, given the horrific nature of the abuse, it’s hard for me to drum up any sympathy for Nathan or Stephanie at the moment. It is reported, however, that both the prosecution and Nathan Sloop’s defense team acknowledged that he had a history of mental illness and that he was mentally ill at the time of the crime.
If this is true, by rights, Nathan should be serving his time in a psychiatric hospital, not in an ordinary state prison in general population. If I was his doctor at the institution, however, I would be very wary of EVER releasing him back into society.