DEL NORTE, Colo.—A 15-year-old boy told a sheriff’s detective he killed his parents because they hassled him about chores and called him derogatory names and he “didn’t want to take it anymore.”
During a video interview played in court Thursday, John Caudle told the investigator that he had just returned from school Oct. 26 when his mother, 34-year-old Joanne Rinebarger, berated him about doing chores. Caudle said he was already grounded for two weeks for getting angry about doing yard work and was tired of being verbally abused with names like “stupid idiot,” “donkey” and “dumb.”
Caudle said he’d taken a gun from his parent’s safe a few days earlier and after the latest argument with his mother, he decided to kill her by shooting her in the head “so she wouldn’t feel anything.” An hour later when his father returned to their home in Monte Vista, a town in rural southern Colorado, he came out of the laundry room where he was hiding and shot him in the back of the head, he said.
Caudle is charged as an adult and faces two counts of first-degree murder for the deaths of his mother and stepfather, Tracy Rinebarger.
“I didn’t want to hurt anymore,” Caudle told the sheriff’s detective.
Caudle said he couldn’t sleep the day of the slayings so he spent his time watching movies and playing on a computer.
Caudle went to school the next day in the family’s pickup truck. Authorities pulled him over hours later for driving erratically.
At one point during the interview, the sheriff’s detective asked the teen, “Do you feel better getting this off your chest?” Caudle, who was sometimes sobbing, responded that he felt worse.
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Information from: The Denver Post,
