Prosecutors are charging an 11-year-old as an adult after the shooting death of his father.
Shortly after midnight following his birthday, Clayton Dietz allegedly shot his sleeping father.
“Daddy’s dead,” he reportedly told his mother.
There are a lot of unanswered questions surrounding the alleged sequence of events. Here’s what we know:
January 12 was allegedly a happy 11th birthday
In the early hours of January 13, police arrived at the Dietz residence on South Market St. in Duncannon, Pennsylvania.
They were responding to a report of an “unresponsive male.”
At 3:20 AM, authorities found Douglas Dietz dead in bed, having apparently died of a gunshot wound to the head.
His wife, Jillian Dietz, had been asleep in bed beside him.
She awoke at a loud noise, thinking that she smelled “fireworks.” Attempting to awaken her husband, she realized that he was wet — from a tremendous amount of blood.
Just hours earlier, the couple had celebrated their birthday of their 11-year-old son, Clayton.
A lot of details are unclear, but allegedly, there was a conflict that night after Jillian had gone to bed.
42-year-old Douglas apparently took away Clayton’s Nintendo Switch and told him to go to bed.
“When his dad told him he needed to go to bed, he got mad at him,” police reported.
Clayton had found the key to the safe and unlocked it, hoping to recover his Switch and continue playing. Instead, he found a gun.
‘I killed daddy’
Police say that the child confirmed to them that he went through the process of “removing the gun from the safe, loading bullets into it and walking over to his father’s side of the bed, he pulled back the hammer, and fired the gun at his father.”
When speaking to him, authorities asked Clayton what he believed would happen when he pulled the trigger.
“He was mad and he had not thought about that,” investigators reported in their affidavit.
Meanwhile, Jillian apparently told police that she found her son hiding in a closet after her husband’s death.
“He’s dead,” he allegedly said. Clayton supposedly then ran downstairs, yelling: “My dad’s dead.”
One detail that only some outlets, like WGAL, have taken the time to report is that Clayton had injuries to his face. There was a contusion above one eye and a laceration on his lip.
The report has not detailed the source of these wounds.
Speculation has ranged from abuse to recoil from the gun. Obviously, that could be a game-changer when it comes to the upcoming trial, as one of those answers could lead to a very reasonable application of jury nullification.
Clayton is being held without bail until his Thursday, January 22 court date. He is being tried as an adult, and has only a public defender in his defense.
As we said, there is a lot that we don’t know. We do know that trying a 5th grader as an adult is nothing short of diabolical.