Al-Mutahan McLean
Warning: the details of this story are disturbing.
An Ohio father is facing life behind bars after pleading guilty to killing his 10-year-old son. Prosecutors say the victim was subjected to “years of sustained extreme abuse and torture” before his life was ended in a most brutal and inhumane fashion.
Al-Mutahan McLean, 32, on Wednesday pleaded guilty in Montgomery County common Pleas Court to one count each of murder, rape, and kidnapping in addition to three counts of child endangerment over the December 2019 death of his Takoda Collins, according to a report from the Dayton Daily News.
Following Wednesday’s plea proceedings, Montgomery County Prosecuting Attorney Matt Heck, Jr. said that beginning in 2015, when Takoda was only 6-years-old, the victim was “subject to various types of abuse, which escalated into extreme torture” that ultimately resulted in his death.
Police on Dec. 13, 2019 responded to a call at McLean’s home, located at 1934 Kensington Drive in Dayton, concerning an unresponsive child. Emergency Medical Services attempted life-saving procedures and transported Takoda to Dayton Children’s Hospital, but the boy was pronounced dead soon thereafter. The medical personnel reported that the child “had numerous injuries, indicative of being severely beaten.”
Law enforcement officials took photographs from inside McLean’s home that reportedly showed blood spatter on several walls, a bathtub filled with several inches of water in it, as well as a suspicious door that was fitted with a padlock, per the Dayton Daily News.
Montgomery County Coroner Kent E. Harshbarger performed an autopsy and determined that Takoda’s cause of death was “blunt force trauma in combination with compressive asphyxia and water submersion.” The report also concluded that the child presented “numerous injury patters” characteristic of being hit with hard objects, multiple fractured ribs, and “excessive acute and healing blunt force injuries (head, torso and extremities – abrasions, contusions and lacerations).”
Court documents showed that the last few years of the child’s life were particularly horrific, the Hamilton Journal-News reported. Investigators said that the boy was often stripped naked and locked in filthy attic inside of the home where he was raped and beaten mercilessly. The Daily News reported that Takoda was “forced to stand bent over and cross-legged for long periods of time and received a beating by McLean if he stopped.”
Heck said that on the day of his death, McLean “traumatically raped and beat young Takoda.”
McLean is due to be sentenced next month and is facing a minimum sentence of 40 to 51 years in prison and a maximum of a life sentence.
In a separate proceeding Wednesday, McLean’s fiancée Amanda Hinze, 30, also pleaded guilty to multiple felonies in connection with Takoda’s death, including involuntary manslaughter and endangering a child. She is facing a maximum sentence of 30 years in prison.
Lynda Dodd, the prosecutor in charge of both cases said McLean was the “primary abuser” and “clear torturer” of Takoda, but emphasized that Hinze often instigated and took part in abusing the child.
“This was a horrendous case,” Dodd said, per the Dayton Daily News. “This child endured years of ongoing, ceaseless, unimaginable torture. For both of these defendants to be headed to prison …. that’s a significant step. They both belong in the penitentiary.”
A third suspect, Hinze’s 27-year-old sister Jennifer Ebert, pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter and endangering children in May 2020.
Jennifer Ebert, Montgomery County Jail
[image via Dayton Police Department]