The plea came days before jury selection was set to begin in Chautauqua County Court.
JAMESTOWN, N.Y. — A local man pleaded guilty in Chautauqua County Court to first-degree manslaughter in the death of his 16-month-old son, ending a criminal case that began after police investigated the child’s April 2024 death as suspicious.
Matthew Nuttall, 27, entered the plea in February, just before his case was due to go to trial. Prosecutors said the child, Isaac Benton, died after Nuttall threw him into a Pack ’n Play while watching him at a Jamestown home. The guilty plea canceled a trial that had been expected to begin with jury selection on Feb. 24. Sentencing is scheduled for April 20, leaving the next stage of the case to the court and the judge who will decide Nuttall’s punishment.
The case traces back to April 13, 2024, when Isaac suffered fatal injuries at a residence on Maple Street in Jamestown, according to prosecutors and police. Authorities said Jamestown police were notified on April 15 of the suspicious death of a child that had occurred two days earlier. Detectives later concluded that Isaac died from blunt force trauma. Prosecutors said Nuttall, who was 26 at the time, intentionally threw the toddler onto a Pack ’n Play while caring for him. Local reporting on the case said investigators believed he acted out of frustration because the child would not stop crying. District Attorney Jason Schmidt, describing the severity of the injuries after the guilty plea, said Isaac was slammed onto the playpen with such force that the autopsy found catastrophic damage to the child’s spine. The language used by prosecutors turned a case already marked by the death of a toddler into one that drew renewed attention as it approached trial.
Police moved quickly after the death was reported. Jamestown investigators built the case and arrested Nuttall on April 17, 2024. He was first charged with second-degree manslaughter, and he was arraigned the next day before being sent to the Chautauqua County Jail. Later, a grand jury returned a superseding indictment charging him with first- and second-degree manslaughter. Prosecutors said that filing reflected what they believed the evidence would show about how Isaac was injured and killed. Court records and local reports said bail was set at $1 million cash or, in the alternative, a $500,000 property bond after the more serious indictment. Even with those public filings, some details remain outside the public record. Authorities have not publicly laid out a full minute-by-minute account of everything that happened inside the home before first responders were called, and the court record available in news accounts does not answer every question about who was present, what was first reported to emergency personnel, or how long it took investigators to decide the death was a homicide.
Officials have pointed to both medical findings and investigative work as central to the prosecution. In announcing the 2024 indictment, Schmidt said the case grew out of a broad investigation by Jamestown police investigators and juvenile detectives. He also credited the county coroner, saying the coroner suspected abuse despite what he called the story initially given to first responders. That detail suggests the case may have turned early on medical and forensic scrutiny rather than only on witness statements. Prosecutors have consistently said Isaac’s death was caused by blunt force trauma. Local coverage of the indictment reported that the child’s spinal cord was severed, while the district attorney’s later public remarks after the plea described the spinal column as coming out in pieces during the autopsy. Together, those statements underscored the violence alleged in the case and previewed the kind of evidence prosecutors appeared ready to present had the case gone before a jury. The plea meant that evidence will not be tested in a trial setting, but it remains the basis of the conviction now entered in court.
The prosecution unfolded against a painful backdrop in Chautauqua County. When Schmidt announced the indictment in June 2024, he said Isaac’s death was one of three child homicide cases in the county during that April. He said the timing made the losses harder to absorb because they came during National Child Abuse Prevention Month, a period meant to focus public attention on child safety and neglect prevention. That wider context did not change the specific evidence in Isaac’s case, but it did help explain the force of the reaction from local officials. Schmidt said at the time that, in years of criminal work and earlier experience as a child welfare caseworker in New York City, he had not seen that number of child homicides in such a short span. His statement framed the case not only as an individual prosecution but as part of a grim month for the county. By the time Nuttall pleaded guilty in February 2026, the case had become one of the most closely watched child death prosecutions in the area, in part because of the age of the victim, the allegations about how he was hurt, and the public record built through the indictment and pretrial proceedings.
The guilty plea sharply changed the legal path ahead. Nuttall had been set to stand trial on the manslaughter charges, and local news outlets reported that jury selection was scheduled to begin on Feb. 24. Instead, at a final pretrial conference on Feb. 18, he pleaded guilty to first-degree manslaughter. That plea canceled the trial and left sentencing as the next major court date. Under New York law, first-degree manslaughter is a serious felony, and the conviction spares prosecutors the burden of proving the case to a jury while also ending any public presentation of witnesses and forensic testimony that might have come at trial. It also means the defense will not contest the allegations in open court before jurors. What remains unknown ahead of sentencing is what arguments each side will emphasize when asking the judge for an appropriate sentence, whether family members will speak in court, and whether the court will release additional factual detail during the sentencing hearing. Jamestown Police Sgt. Daniel Overend said after the plea that investigators worked efficiently and effectively to build the case and that the department remained focused on a sentence that reflects the wrongdoing.
The public statements released so far show both institutional language and the weight of a child death case on the people handling it. Schmidt said, “These are the cases which hit the hardest,” when his office announced the plea. Overend, speaking for Jamestown police after the guilty plea, said officers could not imagine the hurt the victim’s family was going through as sentencing approached. He said the department believed justice should be neither excessive nor too lenient and should remain proportionate to the seriousness of the conduct. Those remarks did not add new evidence, but they showed how officials were trying to explain the plea to a community that had followed the case for nearly two years. In the sparse public record, Isaac appears mostly through his age, his name, and the descriptions of the injuries that killed him. That absence is common in criminal cases involving very young children, where court files and official statements often focus far more on charges and procedure than on the brief life of the victim. Here, the few details available have been enough to make the case one that local authorities, local media and residents continued to remember as it moved toward resolution.
The case now stands at the sentencing stage, with Nuttall convicted after his guilty plea and no trial to follow. The next milestone is the April 20 sentencing hearing in Chautauqua County Court, where the judge is expected to decide the punishment and bring the prosecution closer to its final chapter.