Police say a teenage girl in Florida admitted to killing her mother and her mother’s much younger boyfriend earlier this month. She is being held in juvenile jail but could be charged as an adult.
The Palm Bay Police Department says that 16-year-old Julia Grace Egler is charged with two counts of murder in the first degree.
Police say the suspect left a scary final message for Kelley McCollom, 42, and Matthew Szejnrok, 22, on Saturday night.
“Welcome home,” the girl is said to have told the May-December couple as the killings began in their home on Benchor Road on July 6.
Two people were shot multiple times, and cops say they are both seriously hurt, according to court records obtained by Florida Today. Things did not end so quickly, though.
It was said that she killed her mother with the woman’s own silver.cops say Egler pulled a.38 Special and pointed it at Szejnrok. He begged her to stop as he ran away and tried to hide in the bathroom. There, the girl used a chef’s knife to stab her mother’s boyfriend several times. After that, she killed the person again with the gun.
Police say a fake 911 call was made around 12:06 a.m. on Sunday. Egler was reportedly crying uncontrollably and telling the operator that someone had broken into her family’s home during the call.
When the police arrived a short time later, they found the teen outside the house. For the most part, she reportedly stuck to her story about the burglar. She told police she hid her pit bull in her room when she heard “loud noises” happening in other parts of the house.
The girl’s story fell apart, though, when she was questioned over and over, and she finally admitted to killing the people, according to the police.
The handgun that was hidden just outside the teen’s bedroom window was one of the first hints that police got. It was also said that there were bloody tracks everywhere, and they matched Egler’s shoes. Someone just left the bloody chef’s knife out on the kitchen counter. And there was blood all the way to the bathroom.
During a later interview at the police station, the defendant admitted that she broke into her mother’s bedroom to steal the gun and some bullets, according to court records seen by the Space Coast Rocket, a Florida news website that focuses on the area around the Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. After that, she hid the gun and knife in her pockets and waited for the couple to get home. When they got there just after 10:30 p.m., the killing started.
It turned out that Egler stopped shooting Szejnrok because she ran out of bullets. She then supposedly told police that she started cutting him with a knife. Later, the dying man asked her to go back to her mother’s room and get one more bullet. She then reloaded the handgun with the last round and shot him in the head. Records obtained by Orlando-based CBS station WKMG show that the girl told police that the man “basically asked (Egler) to take him out of his misery.”
Police say that during the hour or so in between, the girl tried to set up the scene to make it look like there had been a break-in. But police say the cover-up was messy because glass was found on top of the bodies of the victims and there were several easily available surveillance cameras with footage that disproved the burglary claim.
WFTV, an ABC affiliate in Orlando, got papers that say Egler “was not happy with the fact that Kelley was not very accepting of her transition and she also did not like that [Kelley] was dating Matthew, who was 22 years old.” This is what the police say happened.
It was said that those problems had been building for a long time.
NBC station WESH in Daytona Beach got an affidavit that says the teen “had reached a boiling point” with McCollom over the teen’s gender and the age difference between her and Szejnrok at the time of the murders.
In public comments this week, police were also quick to say what they thought the accused killer was trying to do.
Space Coast Daily reported that Palm Bay Police Lt. Virginia Kilmer said that Egler’s reasons for the crime were long-standing disagreements with her mother, including disagreements about her gender change and her mother’s relationship with Szejnrok. “Egler was arrested and charged with two counts of 1st Degree Pre-Meditated Murder based on her confession and the forensic evidence found at the scene of the crime.”
Florida Today says that later this month, there will be a delinquency hearing. The 18th Judicial Circuit State Attorney’s Office will decide at this meeting whether Egler will be charged as an adult or not.
Law&Crime asked the Palm Bay police for more information about this story, but they didn’t respond right away at the time of publishing.
