RIVERSIDE, Calif. (AP) — A boy who was only 10 when he fatally shot his white supremacist father was convicted Monday of second-degree murder by a judge who said the child knew what he did was wrong.
Riverside Superior Court Judge Jean Leonard weighed the severity of the crime versus whether the amount of abuse and neglect suffered by the boy, now 12, played a significant role in the slaying of 32-year-old Jeff Hall, a regional leader of the National Socialist Movement.
Leonard noted the boy lay in bed, waited for the right moment and shot his dad at point-blank range with the "bad gun" — a .357 Magnum — while he slept on a sofa in the family home.
"This was not a complex killing," said Leonard, who heard the case without a jury. "He thought about the idea and shot his father."
...Also at issue were the father's racist beliefs.
Hall, 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.
Hall had previously taken the boy on a U.S.-Mexico border patrol trip and showed him how to use a gun, according to court documents.
Sacramento area community musical theater (esp. DMTC in Davis, 2000-2020); Liberal politics; Meteorology; "Breaking Bad," "Better Call Saul," and Albuquerque movie filming locations; New Mexico and California arcana, and general weirdness.
Monday, January 14, 2013
Live By The Gun....
Die by the gun:
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