This was the headline when Vincent Parker killed his parents: “Boy, 16, admits stabbing parents to death after they took his iPod: Says he ‘just got mad.’”
The words of 16-year-old Vincent Parker in Virginia are chilling. “I just remember getting mad,” he told police, according to WTKR-TV. “It’s all from my dad. All this stuff like my dad taking away my iPod and stuff.”
But for Vincent, “just getting mad” in this Case meant beating and stabbing both of his parents with a baseball bat, knives, and a crowbar, according to accounts in the New York Daily News.
The newspaper reported Vincent Parker, an only child, pleaded guilty to two counts of second-degree murder and told investigators he killed his 57-year-old mother, Carol, and 55-year-old father, Wayne, inside the family’s Norfolk home on Dec. 19, 2013.
The former honor roll student attacked his mother first, as she stepped out of a bathroom. According to court papers cited by the Daily News, he doused the woman with pepper spray before stabbing her in the eye, and beating her with a baseball bat and a crowbar — striking her at least 25 times in the neck, face, and head.
Vincent Parker said he hit his father with a crowbar and stabbed him several times when the man came home a short time later. But the father managed to call 911 and told police what happened before he died at a local hospital, the newspaper wrote. His wife was dead at the scene.<6>
Vincent was sentenced to 80 years in prison but that was reduced to 25 years and 10 months – with the first four years being served in a juvenile facility [remember this part about the juvenile facility].
But there was more to this story (from Australian Yahoo! 7 News):
A repressed US teen who became fed-up with his strict parents’ rules and punishments cracked one day and bludgeoned his mother to death before lying in wait to do the same to his father.
Vincent Parker was a bright high school student with an artistic flair who attended church regularly with his parents, Carol and Wayne. The only child lived in a quiet suburb of Norfolk, Virginia, where he had numerous friends and made the honor roll at school. But beneath the surface, Vincent felt repressed as he struggled to come to terms with his sexuality in a strict home where his parents regularly dished out seemingly harsh punishments.
The CBS series, Teens Who Kill explores how Vincent would pour out his true feelings to friends online while living beneath the roof of parents he believed would never approve of his true identity. Vincent came out to his cousin Morgan and expressed himself readily to friends online but with his church-going parents he felt trapped. While his peers seemed to have many liberties, Vincent felt subject to routine and arbitrary punishments.
He did not have a healthy relationship with his father.
Vincent’s cousin Morgan Watkins said she believes his father beat him and called him names like “faggot” and “fruitcake.”
When Vincent told his parents he was gay, they were unable to accept it.<7>
CITED REFERENCES
6. “Boy, 16, admits stabbing parents to death after they took his iPod: Says he ‘just got mad’”
John Luciew. Penn Live: May 30, 2014.
Link: https://www.pennlive.com/midstate/2014/ ... rents.html (accessed April 4, 2019).
7. “Sexually and socially repressed teen murdered his parents after coming out”
Staff contributed. Yahoo! 7 News, Australia: May 21, 2017.
Link: https://au.news.yahoo.com/teen-vincent- ... 93564.html (accessed January 13, 2019).
