A teen who killed his father in Oklahoma last year but claimed self-defense, thereby avoiding prosecution, faces first-degree murder charges in Florida for allegedly stabbing his mother to death.
The 17-year-old faces first-degree murder charges in the death of his 39-year-old mother. Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd said at a Wednesday press conference that he is pushing the state attorney's office to try the teen as an adult and that he's confident the teen would reoffend if released.
"When you look at this, you see a kid," Judd said. "When I look at him, I see a psychopath. I see totally erratic behavior to the point that he’s already, at 17 years of age, shot and killed his father and got away with it and stabbed his mother in the neck so hard that the knife went all the way through.
"Now he’s killed two people and killed his mother and father, and I can assure you – beyond and to the exclusion of every reasonable doubt – based upon his conduct, had he gone to live with his grandmother at the end of this, and she crossed him, she would be next."
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The teen initially told 911 dispatchers that his mother "fell into a knife" after a "very long fight" on Sunday, Judd said.
Deputies who arrived at The Hamptons – a 55-and-older community in Auburndale about 50 miles east of Tampa, where the teen's grandmother is a resident – found him "calm, cool, collected – and he had blood on him," Judd said.
The 17-year-old reportedly became "uncooperative," showed "zero remorse" and had no sense of urgency about his gravely wounded mom.
"He looked the deputy in the eye and said, 'I know my rights, I want an attorney,'" Judd said.
Despite the teen's claims of a protracted fight with his mother before her death, the home was "neat and clean [with] no evidence of any kind of long fight," Judd said.
Witnesses allegedly saw the teen and his mother shouting at each other outside the residence before the teen grabbed his mother by the hair and dragged her inside as she repeatedly pleaded, "Let me go," police said.
The teen's grandmother, who was not present during the altercation, told WFLA that the teen had been verbally and physically confrontational with his mother on several occasions.
After his mother was pronounced dead, a medical examiner determined that the deep knife wound in her neck was inconsistent with an accidental injury.
"The medical examiner said it's just not reasonable or plausible that she died the way that he said she did," Judd said on Wednesday. "It just didn't happen."
Judd said that as investigators started "to peel back the layer of this onion," they "[found] out that this is not just a singular event"; last year, the teen's father also died by his hand.
"On Feb. 14, 2023, Valentine’s Day, in Lincoln County, Oklahoma, [he] said his dad pulled a knife on him, and he shot and killed his dad," Judd said. "He shot him once in the chest and once in the head, and he claimed self-defense."
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Oklahoma authorities dropped charges against the teen less than a month after the shooting because they could not disprove his "assertion of self-defense," Judd said.
The teen's mother paid $50,000 to bail him out of jail, the New York Post reported. Then he moved into her Charlotte County, Florida, home and was involuntarily committed to a hospital for mental health reasons within a month.
Around this time, Judd said, he made a threatening statement: "I'll kill myself, or I'll kill my mother by shooting or stabbing her."
In November 2023, the teen "pushed [his mother] to the ground and ... stomped on her" after she took away his video game privileges, Judd said. He was arrested and claimed self-defense again, but the argument failed that time, and he spent time behind bars, the sheriff said.
After another argument with his mother in February of this year, the teen fled to his grandmother's house in Auburndale. The teen's mother and grandmother both contacted the sheriff's office around that time and said they felt unsafe around him, Judd said, and at that point, the teen was turned over to family services.
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But despite making more threats to kill his mother, the teen was reunited with his family despite making threats to kill his mother again about two weeks later, Judd said.
According to the sheriff, the teen got into "an argument about home chores" that led him to "flee from his mother's house and [go to] his grandmother's house" on Sept. 6. The suspect's mother drove to the grandmother's house the next day, which is when she and the teenager got into the altercation that cost her life.
Judd said he will share any information uncovered in his department's investigation that could incriminate the teen in his father's death with authorities in Oklahoma.
"If Oklahoma had been able to act, [the teen's mother] would be alive and well today," he said. "But because she took him in and tried to do like a mother should do and took care of him, she’s now dead. Everybody that should be special to him in his life is dead when they cross him," he added.
