A Utah man who served two years in prison for breaking a child’s arm pleaded guilty last week to killing a 2-year-old boy and will spend the rest of his life in prison.
Jonathan Allen Dunn, 37, also pleaded guilty to abusing the toddler’s twin sister, who was hospitalized with a brain hemorrhage, according to KSTU.
Dunn was sentenced to life in prison without parole as part of a plea deal, making the death penalty ineligible.
“I am sorry for what I did. It haunts me every day. I hope that one day my family can forgive me for what I did,” Dunn said at the sentencing.
Dunn was babysitting the two children on December 20, 2023, despite being convicted in May 2017 of breaking the arm of a child in his care in 2016, CrimeOnline reported. He was released from prison in April 2019 and was on parole until December 2021.
There were several other children in the house the night of the murder, including another 2-year-old. Charging documents say Dunn told investigators he began hitting the children “harder than he should have” while they were supposedly playing a game. He pinched them violently, including on the genitals, and repeatedly threw them on the bed, hit them in the head with the handle of a Nerf gun and slammed him headfirst into a door frame.
He gave them painkillers before putting them to bed, but the boy was wheezing in the morning, so he gave him more painkillers. Later that morning, he stopped breathing and Dunn called 911.
“This is not a mistake, this is not an accident, this was nothing less than deliberate depravity,” Judge Noel S. Hyde said when handing down the verdict, according to KSTU. “There are no words that can adequately describe the level of depravity that this situation creates.”
Dunn pleaded guilty on August 13 to aggravated murder, two counts of aggravated sexual abuse of a child and aggravated child abuse.
Subscribe to the Crime Stories with Nancy Grace podcast for the latest true crime and justice news.
(Featured image: Jonathan Dunn/Cache County Sheriff’s Office and Aleister/GoFundMe)
