More than six years after one defendant was convicted at trial and three pleaded guilty in the starvation death of an Ash Fork child, the Arizona Supreme Court ruled last week that the victim’s sister may demand restitution for her sibling’s “future lost wages� -- so long as those wages can be calculated without undue “speculation or conjecture.�
The court did not provide specific guidance on how the potential lifetime income of a person who died at age 6 should be determined.
Nearly a decade ago in June 2015, deputies with the Coconino County Sheriff’s Office and emergency medical personnel responded to a call of an unresponsive boy in a home in an unincorporated area north of Ash Fork. The boy, Jason Hester, was ultimately pronounced dead later in the day at Flagstaff Medical Center.
He weighed only 29 pounds at the time of his death, and the circumstances of the incident sparked a yearlong criminal investigation into the possibility of neglect and abuse.
In August 2018, Jason’s aunt Lillian Hester -- his primary caretaker -- was found guilty by a jury of first-degree murder and child abuse. Lillian’s boyfriend Jason Conlee pleaded guilty to a single count of endangerment, as did the boy's grandmother, Lenda Hester, and her boyfriend Kimmy Wilson.
Lillian Hester is serving a life sentence in Arizona state prison. The other defendants were all sentenced to terms of supervised probation -- now concluded.
But since the criminal prosecutions concluded, three of the four defendants have remained entangled in a yearslong legal fight over what financial restitution Jason’s surviving sister may legally claim from them. (Wilson is no longer liable for restitution.) The case has led to one ruling from the Arizona Court of Appeals and two from the Arizona Supreme Court.
When the defendants made their guilty pleas in 2018, all included an addendum that restitution in the case would be limited to a total of $500,000. Jason’s surviving sibling, referred to in court documents as “E.H.,� objected to that limit through her attorney and filed a motion to reconsider the cap. But Coconino County Judge Dan Slayton upheld the cap, citing previous case law.
In 2020, the Arizona Supreme Court overruled Slayton and sided with E.H.
“Capping restitution in a plea agreement without a victim’s consent violates a victim’s right to full restitution,� Chief Justice Robert Brutinel wrote in the court’s .
The court’s first intervention, however, did not completely resolve the disagreement. By that point, E.H. and her counsel had already made a demand for restitution totaling $3,322,880.20. That amount, they claimed, was what Jason could have earned over his lifetime -- the “lost wages� resulting from his death.
The numerical figure was provided by a University of Utah economist working from the premise that, had Jason survived, nothing “would have prevented him from becoming a typical adult with the ability to earn a living.� The calculations assumed he would have earned the average U.S. wage beginning in his first year of work eligibility, 2031.
The defendants in the case disagreed with both the legal basis of the claim and the calculations. They challenged E.H.’s right to claim compensation for lost wages and presented a competing estimate of the “present value� of those lost wages: between $153,712 and $919,598, supposedly accounting for consumption over the earning period.
Slayton ruled that the lost wages were “consequential damages,� which are excluded from restitution. And the Arizona Court of Appeals, Division One, upheld that ruling in 2024.
“The trial court thus did not abuse its discretion in finding that J.H.’s future lost wages were consequential damages not subject to restitution,� Vice Chief Judge Randall M. Howe .
The Arizona Supreme Court disagreed, however. In its April 30, 2025, , the court found that Jason’s lost wages were not “consequential damages� but rather “direct economic loss.� The justices remanded the case back to Superior Court for a decision on whether the estimate of future earnings has been “sufficiently demonstrated� and an evidentiary hearing if necessary.
The decision seems likely to prompt new arguments over what constitutes a “reasonable basis� for calculating the potential income of a child who never reached middle school. The 2024 Court of Appeals ruling acknowledged the difficulty of that question: “Which education level would J.H. likely have attained? Where would he have lived and under which social and economic conditions would he have lived? How long would he have lived?�
“Without such answers,â€� that opinion continued, “the trial court had no basis to choose which, if any, of the expert’s earning ranges were the correct ones to select as restitution.â€� The questions the appeals court raised remain unanswered as the case returns to the court where it began.Â
However the trial court rules now, the long history of appeals and reversals in the case suggests the next decision still might not be the final word.Â