Oregon Teenager Pleads Guilty, Sentenced to 11 Years in Swastika Attack

Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky
An Oregon teenager pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 11 years in prison on Thursday for taking part in an attack on a friend who was beaten, forced to eat cat feces and had a swastika carved into his forehead, prosecutors said.
Blue Kalmbach, 16, the last of four teenage defendants to plead guilty in the case, entered guilty pleas to first-degree kidnapping, robbery and second-degree assault, Multnomah County Deputy District Attorney Christopher Ramras said.
Ramras said Kalmbach was responsible “for the most, sort of, hands on physical abuse,” Ramras said, and thus received the longest sentence of the four. Kalmbach apologized in court before he was sentenced.
In February, the four teenagers were charged with luring 15-year-old Dustyn Murrian into a shed, hitting him with a crowbar, shooting him with a BB gun, forcing him to eat cat feces and carving the Nazi symbol into his forehead with a box cutter.
At the time of the crime, Murrian said his attackers told him they wanted money and a skateboard. They allowed him to leave the shed to get the items but he fled to a nearby auto shop, where employees called police.
Kalmbach, Jenna Montgomery, 15, and Jess Taylor, 17, were charged as adults with assault, kidnapping and robbery. Montgomery was sentenced to nearly nine years in a youth correctional facility and Taylor to about 7-1/2 years, Ramras said.
Shane Connell, 14, was tried as a juvenile and earlier sentenced to 10 years.
It’s our birthday and we’re still celebrating!
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news.
This week we celebrate 129 years of the Forward. We’re proud of our origins as a Yiddish print publication serving Jewish immigrants. And we’re just as proud of what we’ve become today: A trusted source of Jewish news and opinion, available digitally to anyone in the world without paywalls or subscriptions.
We’ve helped five generations of American Jews make sense of the news and the world around them — and we aren’t slowing down any time soon.
As a nonprofit newsroom, reader donations make it possible for us to do this work. Support independent, agenda-free Jewish journalism and our board will match your gift in honor of our birthday!
