8-Yr.-Old Boy Allegedly Confesses To Planned Murders On Police TapeWednesday November 19, 2008
CityNews.ca Staff
You can't see his face and you don't know his name. But the words coming out of the mouth of a squeaky voiced 8-year-old are still chilling.
A videotape of the police interrogation of a young child charged with premeditated murder has been released to some news organizations and it shows the boy apparently confessing to the unbelievable act.
We first brought you the story out of St. Johns, Arizona, about 275 kilometres from Phoenix, earlier this month. The child is accused of plotting and then carrying out the murder of his 29-year-old father and a 39-year-old co-worker at his home in the city of about 4,000 on November 5th.
The 60 minute video shows cops questioning the youngster, who was the only one home at the time. His face has been blacked out but his words are all-too clear. He talks about "finding" the bodies of his dad and the other man after coming home from school.
And he sounds remarkably mature for someone so young. "I was thinking, 'What the heck is going on?'" the child remarks on the tape. "'Who did this? Why would anyone do this?'"
It took a while for cops to coax the child into saying what they believed he'd done. His story changes throughout the chilling hour. He begins by denying he ever touched a weapon, then agrees he found one and threw it in a closet.
He soon talks about shooting at a car he "saw" speeding away from the home, containing the people he maintains shot his dad and his friend.
He then claims he shot his father to prevent him from suffering and put a bullet in his friend because "he was shaking."
"I think I shot my dad because he was suffering, he was suffering so I may have shot him," he outlines in a voice that radiates pure innocence. "I didn't want him to suffer.
"Then I went outside and then first I saw him and I think the gun went off at that time, because he was shaking and then I went upstairs and I saw my dad and I think that I shot him because he was suffering."
But he never explains how or why the men were "suffering."
It's not until the end where police explain that forensic tests can definitively prove whether he fired a gun that what detectives say is the real story emerges. The little boy confesses he allegedly planned and committed the act, shooting each man at least twice and even stopping to reload.
"Um, my dad... I think twice," he responds when asked how often he fired.
Asked if it could have been more than twice, he answers simply, "I thought it was twice."
And how many times did he hit the roommate?
"I think twice like my dad," he concludes.
He recalls that his father taught him how to use guns to go hunting but that he was expressly forbidden to touch weapons in his home. It was an order he didn't heed and he told cops he felt guilty about it.
"I'm going to go to juvie," he sullenly announces after he's finished reciting what he'd allegedly done.
Police are probing whether abuse was a factor in the killings, but those who knew the family insist there was never any sign of anything wrong and it was totally unlike the father to harm his son. School records show the child never had any discipline problems in class that would have hinted at troubles at home.
A gag order on the case prevents a lot of details from being released, but the tape may be the closest we ever get to a possible motive. The youngster admits he was mad at his father, after his stepmother spanked him at his dad's urging, when he didn't bring home some necessary papers from school earlier that week.
Lawyers for the boy argue his confession was coerced and manipulated, noting no legal representative or guardian was there when he was being questioned. And most don't think the tape will ever be allowed in court.
The boy is being considered a minor, although under Arizona law anyone eight years of age or older can be legally tried as an adult.
An Arizona TV station, which obtained the tape, has posted the entire interview online.
Click here to see it.
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Is it just me, ...or have the rest of you noticed a sharp increase in the number of controversial gun incidents lately?
