The 10-year-old son of a neo-Nazi leader told his younger sister that he planned to shoot their father, then a day later took a gun from his parents' bedroom and fired one bullet into his father's head as he slept on a couch, a prosecutor alleged Tuesday.
The boy's father, Jeff Hall, was an out-of-work plumber who as regional leader of the National Socialist Movement headed rallies at a synagogue and a day labor site.
In opening statements at the murder trial, Riverside County prosecutor Michael Soccio
dismissed the notion that Hall's neo-Nazi beliefs contributed to his
son's behavior, as the defense maintains, and instead said the boy, now
12, was a violent child who had been kicked out of every school he
attended.
The boy also suspected his father was going to leave his
stepmother, and he didn't want the family to split up, prosecutors have
said.
"You'll learn that (the
child) would have shot his father even if he'd been a member of the
Peace and Freedom Party. It made no difference," Soccio said, before
showing the court photos of Hall playing tea party with his young
children. "They lived a relatively normal life."
The Associated Press is not identifying the child because he is a juvenile.
The
boy with light brown hair sat quietly in court next to his attorney and
wore a purple polo shirt and glasses. He showed little emotion when the
prosecution flashed photos through a projector of his blood-spattered
father, and he appeared to be taking notes in a spiral-bound notebook.On several occasions, he asked his attorney how to spell the name of a witness taking the stand.
Defense attorney Matthew Hardy countered in his opening statement that his client had grown up in an abusive and violent environment and was conditioned to believe it was right to kill people who were a threat.
Hall taught his son to shoot guns, took him to neo-Nazi rallies and once to the Mexican border to teach him how to "make sure he knew what to do to protect this place from the Mexicans," Hardy said.
"If you were going to create a monster, if you were going to create a killer, what would you do?" he said. "You'd put him in a house where there's domestic violence, child abuse, racism."
Hardy
also claimed the boy's stepmother Krista McCrary, who is expected to
testify, goaded the boy into killing Hall because Hall was planning to
leave her for another woman. Hall sent her text messages on the night he
was shot saying he would divorce her, and spent more than five hours
talking to his girlfriend on the phone, Hardy said.
McCrary
sat in on the child's interviews with police and psychiatrists after
the shooting, he said, and she lied to investigators.
The boy saw
an opportunity when his father came home from a party but was locked out
and had to get in the house by crawling through a window, Soccio said.Hall fell asleep on the couch, and the boy got a gun from his parent's room and shot Hall at near point-blank range behind his left ear, the prosecutor said.
"He held the gun about a foot away and, as he explained, he took four fingers and put them into the trigger and pulled the trigger back and the gun discharged," Soccio said, showing images of a bloodied Hall on the couch covered by a blue blanket.
Several police officers testified that the boy and at least one of his siblings voluntarily gave statements immediately after the shooting that indicated the boy had killed his father.
One younger sister asked the boy why he hadn't shot their father in the stomach, as he said he planned to do, according to Officer Robert Monreal, who picked up the exchange on a belt recorder.
Prosecutors previously said the two siblings talked about the killing as they played on a swing set.
Another
officer testified that the boy was held in a patrol car at the scene
and began to talk almost non-stop from the backseat. Officer Michael
Foster said the child acknowledged shooting his father and began to show
remorse.
"He was sad about
it. He wished he hadn't done it," Foster recalled. "He asked me about
things like, do people get more than one life, things like that. He
wanted to know if he was dead or if he just had injuries."
The
boy has a history of being expelled from school for violence, starting
at age 5 when he stabbed a teacher with a pencil on the first day of
kindergarten, Soccio said outside court. He also tried to strangle a
teacher with a telephone cord a few years later, he said.
Hall,
32, who said he believed in a white breakaway nation, ran for a seat on
the local water board in 2010 in a move that disturbed many residents
in the recession-battered suburbs southeast of Los Angeles. The day
before his death, he held a meeting of the neo-Nazi group at his home.
The
boy's stepmother told authorities that Hall had hit, kicked and yelled
at his son for being too loud or getting in the way. Hall and the boy's
biological mother had previously slugged through a divorce and custody
dispute in which each had accused the other of child abuse.
Kathleen
M. Heide, a professor at the University of South Florida in Tampa who
wrote "Why Kids Kill Parents," said children 10 and under rarely kill
their parents and that only 16 such cases were documented between 1996
and 2007.
Heide also said parenting and home life would undoubtedly play a role in the development of the boy.
If a judge finds the boy murdered Hall, he could be held in state custody until he is 23 years old.
The state currently houses fewer than 900 juveniles.
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On
June 4, 1923, jockey Frank Hayes took off through the gates at Belmont
Park on Long Island. He and his horse, Sweet Kiss, made it to the finish
line first. But all was not well. During the race, Hayes had a heart
attack and died. Nonetheless, he was declared the winner:
