The 19-year-old walked up the long driveway to his family's mobile home on Saturday evening armed with 100 rounds of ammunition and clad in camouflage clothing. He slipped in through the back door, and with six children looking on - most of them his siblings - he fatally shot his mother, stepfather and grandmother, police say.
"From what I've seen and heard, he just took 'em by surprise," eastern Tennessee Sherriff Wayne Anderson, told the
Associated Press. "It just all happened real fast."
The teenager, Robert Seth Denton, went outside, laid down his gun and walked to the neighbouring trailer where his grandfather Curtis Rose had been doing repairs,
Anderson told the AP.
Call 911," he told the older man.
Rose hadn't heard the gunfire over the noise of his power tools, so he was unprepared for the horrifying scene he found when he went to the trailer next door.
He moved the children to another room, called the police, then grabbed a pistol and ran out of the home to see Denton heading back down the driveway, investigators told local TV station
WJHL.
[...]
Denton was taken to a local hospital before being arraigned in Bristol, Tennessee, according to WJHL. One of the children in the home, a seven-year-old who was injured when a fragment struck her in the hip, was also taken to hospital and is in stable condition.
Denton's mother and grandmother, Toshya Milhorn, 39, and Lena Rose, 57, died at the scene.
His stepfather, James Millhorn, 36, was flown to hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
[...]
Meanwhile, family members, neighbours and police are puzzling over what could have driven Denton allegedly to commit such violence, and worrying about how the six young witnesses - all of them under the age of 12 - will be affected.
"We have gained a lot of information that he has hated his mother for most of his life," Anderson told the AP. "He had made statements … over the years that he wanted to kill her."
Officials said that Denton had served briefly in the army and didn't seem to have any criminal record. He grew up in the trailer where he allegedly killed his relatives, but at the time of the shooting was living in an apartment in Bristol. It's not clear why he approached Rose rather than killing him as well.
"Why he didn't shoot his grandfather and went out there and told him is beyond me," Anderson added to the AP.
Heather Milhorn, the younger sister of Denton's stepfather, told
WJHL that James had felt "eerie" about his 19-year-old stepson, who was open about his dislike for his mother.
"But he never really thought of something like that. Seth was his child basically," she said.
She's not angry at Denton any more, she told WJHL. "The question I have is: why? Why did he do it to them?" she said.
But Heather Milhorn worries about James and Toshya's five children and stepchildren, who were in the home and saw their parents shot.
"They lost their mom, their dad and their grandmother," she said. "They were constantly around them, so it's like pieces of them are gone … and the fact they had to watch it."
The sixth child was a visitor, according to the AP.
An emotional Anderson told the AP that the shooting was the worst he'd dealt with in his 41-year career.
"These kids, they saw everything that went on, and they've got to live with that the rest of their life, all six of them," he said. "It was the worst horrific scene that I've seen."
Darell Gray, who lives near the Milhorns, said he heard a barrage of about a dozen gunshots and the sound of screams lasting less than a minute.
Then, "We heard somebody," he told the AP. "They said, 'Daddy, Daddy, Daddy.' "