People You’ll See In Hell

Regularly featured in “Parents” magazine, Jessica Botzko and John Westover thought it was a good idea to keep their 10-year-old son in a dog kennel meant for a Jack Russell Terrier.

The kennel measured slightly smaller than two feet wide by two feet high.

Whenever John felt like using or making drugs, he’d lock the boy inside the cage for hours at a time.

He usually locked the boy in while Jessica Botzko was stripping at the local strip club - the Deja Vu.

On the 1st of May, 2007, the oldest boy and his 5-year-old younger brother ran away while John Westover was gone and while their mom was off stripping.

Jessica Botzko and John Westover apparently enjoyed disciplining both their sons, putting shock collars on both the boys. If Jessica or John felt that the children were being disrespectful, or if the kids just got in the way, they’d use the remote control to shock the kids until they cried.

Neither child was fed regularly. The 10-year old weighed just 61 pounds, which is in the bottom 10th percentile for kids his age. Usually 10-year-old boys weigh between 110 and 130 pounds. Officers who first came across the boy thought he was a little girl because of how small he was.

It’s not like there was no food in the house. When police served the search warrant they took pictures of a very full refrigerator. There were crab legs in the freezer. There was milk and cheese. There were candy bars.

According to John Westover, the youngest boy was stealing food.

Gee. Maybe, possibly, could he have been stealing the food because he was hungry?

Some of those thefts resulted in the kid being put in the cage and shocked with the dog collar.

As police served the search warrant they were astounded by how much garbage was in the home. Dirty clothes and garbage was all over the floor - at one point three feet deep.

While the trailer was a pest-hole, the pet lizard’s cage was pristine, an odd, ironic twist.

Neighbors in the trailer park say they rarely saw the oldest boy outside.

“I didn’t even know they had kids,” neighbor Mike Solo said.

The oldest boy was registered as being home-schooled. He had never been in school in his life.

Both parents were arrested and charged with child endangerment and manufacturing drugs.

Their oldest boy was removed from the home in 1998, when Botzko was 19. She was charged at that time with child endangerment, but completed a drug program and got her kid back.

Westover was wanted for child endangerment in Ohio, and has a (surprise!) lengthy criminal record.

This wonderful couple had a baby girl who died a while back due to what was thought at the time to be SIDS. Authorities are going to re-examine that case.

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