HENDERSONVILLE, TN — Police say that a teenager accused of murdering his mother not only smiled as he confessed, but that he told them he was smiling as he beat her to death.
The 15-year-old has been accused of beating his mother to death with a blunt object before trying to burn the house down with his 16-year-old brother still inside.
The older brother says that after a smoke alarm woke him up just after midnight Saturday morning, he ran to check on his mother, 46-year-old Melanie Davis. He would find her beaten to death in her bed. The boy ran from the home and went to a neighbor for help.
Dispatcher: “You need police, fire or medical?”
Neighbor: “I need both. The neighbor came across the street saying his mom is dead in the bed and it looks like a fire in the game room.”
Dispatcher: “Now is she for sure dead? Or do they think that?”
Neighbor: “I don’t know. I’m not going in the house until someone gets here. The 16-year-old son come running across the street crying and the alarm is going off in the house.”
The boy told responding police that he lived at the home with his mother and his 15-year-old brother who was missing. Davis was a single mother who had been raising her two sons alone after losing her husband to Lou Gehrig’s disease in 2007.
Police began looking for the younger teen by tracking his cell phone and found him at around 6 a.m. walking down the street with a backpack seven miles away. Sheriff Sonny Weatherford says that he admitted to killing his mother and smiled as he made the confession. He also told investigators that he was smiling as he murdered his mother.
Weatherford described the boy as “scary” and has shown no remorse for the murder of his mother, nor has he provided a motive. The boy doesn’t have a criminal record and his teachers at Station Camp High School say he was just a typical teenager.
The teen is currently being held in a Sumner County juvenile detention center. Because of his age, his name has not been released to the public. He has a detention hearing today where Assistant District Attorney Tara Wyllie says she will request that the teen be held indefinitely pending the outcome of the case. According to prosecutors, they will be filing a motion asking that the teenager be tried as an adult and that his case be transferred to criminal court.
If being beat to death by your own son isn’t bad enough, she can’t even be buried. Davis has no other surviving family members and relatives in Austria can’t afford to foot the bill. Because of this, investigators are asking her friends and co-workers to help pay for her burial. Looking at her Facebook, it looks like Davis had recently started marathon running and biking. There are also some pictures of her two sons. They are just pics, but the youngest one doesn’t look quite right in the head.
As for the older brother, he is currently in the care of a neighbor. “He is doing as well as we can expect him to be,” Weatherford said. “His mother is a victim now and it’s caused by his younger brother. He’s kind of destroyed.”
Tags: Beating, Crime, Juvenile, Melanie Davis, mother, Murder, Tennessee
