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| “ | It was her fault because she wouldn't tell me where the money was! Jeremy was crying! He wouldn't do anything, so I had to do it! If she just told me where the money was, I wouldn't had to have hurt her! | „ |
| ~ Zachary unintentionally incriminating himself in the rape and murder of Susan Ostreicher |
Zachary Connor is the main antagonist of the Law & Order: Special Victims Unit episode "Juvenile". He is a 12-year-old sociopath who rapes and murders a woman after manipulating a classmate into helping him break into her apartment.
He was portrayed by Connor Paolo, who would go on to portray Teddy Winnock in a later SVU episode as well as Tom Gurney in Bully.
Overview[]
Zachary is a sixth grader at P.S. 264, a public middle school in Manhattan. While he is a straight-A student who seems friendly and likable, he is actually a sociopath who engages in petty vandalism and steals for fun; he is also a skilled liar and adept at not getting caught, so he has no disciplinary record at school. He eventually moves on to burglarizing apartments to get an adrenaline rush, the closest thing to actual emotions that he is capable of.
He notices a woman in his neighborhood, Susan Ostreicher, carrying around a lot of money and assumes she is a drug dealer, so he decides to rob her. (He is unaware that she in fact a cancer patient who is growing marijuana to ease the nausea she and a group of fellow cancer sufferers experience from chemotherapy.)
He befriends a developmentally delayed 14-year-old classmate named Jeremy Brice and manipulates him into helping him break into Ostreicher's apartment. When Ostreicher unexpectedly comes home and catches them in the act, Zachary hits her over the head with her own telephone and intimidates Jeremy into getting him a knife from the kitchen. He then rapes her and stabs her to death as Jeremy vomits in fear and revulsion. Zachary steals whatever money he can find and runs out of the apartment; a remorseful Jeremy drapes a blanket over Ostreicher's body, and then follows Zachary out of the apartment.
"Juvenile"[]
Detective Fin Tutuola of the NYPD's Special Victims Unit finds out about Ostreicher's rape and murder from a detective in the department's Narcotics Division who was going to arrest her for dealing marijuana, only to find her abused and mutilated corpse. The SVU team investigate the case, at first believing that the killer is mentally ill because of the wildly inconsistent behavior displayed in the attack. When Medical Examiner Melinda Warner analyzes the vomit left at the scene, however, she recognizes the food that the killer threw up as items in the school lunch served in middle schools all over the city - meaning that the killer is a child.
Detectives Olivia Benson and Elliot Stabler question one of Ostreicher's neighbors, and they notice that her pre-teen son has an MP3 player. When they ask him where he got it, he replies that Jeremy gave it to him, and that he told Jeremy that Ostreicher was a drug dealer. Benson and Stabler find Jeremy waiting for the school bus and notice a bloodstain on his jacket, so they arrest the terrified boy. He denies everything, but his fingerprints are found at the crime scene, even though his DNA does not match the rapist's.
Detectives John Munch and Fin Tutuola go to Jeremy's school and ask the principal about Jeremy's friends, only for the principal to reply that Jeremy doesn't have any. He gives Munch and Fin permission to search his students' lockers, and they find Ostreicher's wallet and the knife that killed her in Zachary's locker.
They arrest Zachary and interrogate him, while Benson and Stabler interrogate Jeremy in another room. Zachary says he was in the school library when the murder occurred, and that he found the knife and wallet in a dumpster after Jeremy told him it was there. When Munch confronts him with the fact that he left his fingerprints at the crime scene, Zachary says that he was there with Jeremy, that the robbery was Jeremy's idea, and that Jeremy killed Ostreicher after forcing him to rape her. Jeremy admits to breaking into her apartment with Zachary to rob her, but he insists that he had no idea what Zachary was going to do to her.
Since Zachary is only 12, Assistant District Attorney Alexandra Cabot has no choice but to prosecute him as a juvenile in family court, where he will likely receive a lenient sentence; Jeremy, meanwhile, will be charged as an adult with second-degree murder and face life in prison if convicted. Cabot tries to have Jeremy prosecuted as a juvenile, but SVU Bureau Chief Elizabeth Donnelly, acting on orders from District Attorney Arthur Branch, tells her to charge the boy as an adult. When Cabot refuses, Donnelly takes up the prosecution herself, while ordering Cabot to assist her as second chair.
During Jeremy's trial, Donnelly tells Cabot to call Zachary as a witness, cryptically instructing her to "make sure he tells the truth". While he is testifying, Cabot says that he must have felt afraid when Ostreicher caught him and Jeremy in the act of robbing her, something Zachary adamantly denies. When Cabot asks him at what point during the robbery that he had thrown up, he insists that Jeremy had vomited and started crying because he couldn't stand to look at Ostreicher's blood; he then brags that he could look at Ostreicher's mutilated body without flinching, unlike Jeremy, who he says was "being a baby". Finally, Cabot says that he must have been afraid of both Jeremy and Ostreicher, provoking an enraged Zachary to scream that it was Ostreicher's own fault that he raped her because she wouldn't tell him where the money was, and that he killed her because Jeremy wouldn't. As Cabot ends her questioning, Zachary levels a cold, dead-eyed stare at her, finally showing himself for who and what he truly is.
Even though Zachary has implicated himself as the killer, however, Jeremy is still found guilty of second-degree murder because he took part in a burglary that resulted in someone's death. He is sentenced to life in prison, while Zachary, who committed the worst of the offenses, is sentenced to 18 months in a juvenile facility.
External links[]
- Zachary Connor on the Law & Order Wiki
