A four-year old boy was shot to death by his common-law father, a religious leader who thought the boy was gay, because he had slapped another boy’s behind. As The New Civil Rights Movement reported earlier this month, four-year old Jadon Higganbothan was murdered by Peter Lucas Moses, 27, who also shot to death a 28-year old woman, Antoinetta Yvonne McKoy, police and prosecutors say.
Now that prosecutors have revealed Moses’s motivation for thinking four-year old Jardon was gay, we also learned on Friday they asked for the death penalty in this tragic North Carolina case. Moses now faces two counts of first-degree murder.
Moses, whom police had stopped short of calling a cult leader, is believed to have belonged to a religious group known as the Black Hebrew Israelites.
He lived in a one-room home with nine children and three women, who all called him “lord.” One of the women reportedly turned into a police informant, which is how police and prosecutors have so much detailed information.
The 28-year old woman whom Moses killed, Antoinetta Yvonne McKoy, had been beaten and strangled with an extension cord by the other women before Moses murdered her. The day he did, she had escaped to a neighbor’s house and begged her to use her cell phone. The neighbor did not call police because she claims she thought the woman might be mentally disturbed. She witnessed Moses dragging her into the house, and still never called police.
“Sometime in October 2010, prosecutors told the judge, one of the women told the defendant that Jadon had hit another child’s bottom, and Moses retaliated because he thought the boy might be homosexual – partially because the child’s father had left his mother,” the News-Observer, a local Durham County paper reported, adding, “Investigators discovered the remains in June, months after their investigation began as a missing person case.”
“Homosexuality, [District Attorney] Cline contended, is frowned upon by the Black Hebrews, so the defendant asked the boy’s mother to get rid of him.
“Moses then ordered two of the other women to set up computers and speakers in the garage, prosecutors contend, then the defendant took the boy into the garage, where music and the Lord’s Prayer in Hebrew blared, and a gunshot sounded. One of the women told investigators the boy was shot in the head.
“Some of the women cleaned up his bloodied body, prosecutors said, then put it in a suitcase in the master bedroom until Moses complained about the smell.”
And indeed, Jadon had been reported missing months ago. Via the website Help Find The Missing, we found this February Colorado missing person report for a woman believed to be Jadon’s mother, named, Vania Rae Sisk, which also lists Jadon as missing, but age six.
A reader of The New Civil Rights Movement, in the comments section of our previous report on this story, wrote, “I live in the same town, though not in the same neighborhood, and I didn’t know them. But this town has a lot of violence and gang activity. I know people that see things happen and won’t report….they are terrified of retaliation if anyone finds out it was them that reported something….and they have every right to be terrified, because they WOULD be retaliated against.”
“The Hebrew Israelite movement is a group of militant black supremacists as reported by the Southern Poverty Law Center,” writes Jonathan Turley, noted CNN contributor and law professor. “The Hebrew Israelites call for death for Jews and gay men and lesbians, and celebrate the Christmas holiday by “lynching” effigies of the Virgin Mary and Santa Claus.”