When baby-faced brothers Alex and Derek King, 12-and-13-years-old, respectively, killed their father in his Cantonment, Florida home on the Sunday after Thanksgiving 2001 with a baseball bat and then set the house afire to conceal evidence of the slaying, the story made national headlines. The case became one of the most notorious killings in the state’s history. Six years later Alex, now 18, is a free man. He was released on Wednesday morning, April 9, 2008 at 9:45 a.m. after serving six years for his part in his father’s death.
To recap the story, the boys’ father, Terry King, was sitting in a living room chair with his feet propped up on a sofa, asleep, when he was bludgeoned to death with an aluminum baseball bat. Firefighters working feverishly to extinguish the blaze that had been deliberately set, discovered his body. Closer examination revealed that the left side of his head had been bashed in, making it easy to determine that he hadn’t died from smoke inhalation. His two sons, Alex and Derek, were nowhere to be found. At first authorities considered the possibility that they might have been abducted, but the following day they showed up at the Escambia County Sheriff’s Office after being driven there by a family friend, 40-year-old Rick Chavis.
The two boys soon confessed that they had killed their father. Alex claimed that he had thought up the bizarre plan, and Derek said that he had been the one who had swung the bat. They were worried, they said, that their father was going to punish them for having ran away from home 10 days earlier. It turned out that they had been staying at the home of their dad’s friend, Chavis, a convicted sex-offender, for many of those ten days. It was later shown that Chavis had allowed them to hide in a back room of his trailer home when their father had come looking for them. Chavis had been convicted in 1984 of molesting three boys of varying ages. According to Alex’s testimony before a grand jury and to letters that he had written, he and Chavis had entered into a sexual relationship.
“My ultimate goal in life now is (to be) what he is,” Alex wrote. “It is about sharing your life with someone else. Before I met Rick, I was straight, but now I am gay.”
Alex and Derek were swiftly indicted by a grand jury on first-degree murder charges, and Chavis was charged with being an accessory after the fact, tampering with evidence, and molesting Alex. Surprisingly, Chavis was later acquitted of the sex-offenses involving Alex.
Although their confession had contained details of Terry King’s murder that could have only been known by the perpetrators, the boys recanted and instead blamed Chavis, insisting that he had killed their father while they waited outside, hiding in the trunk of Chavis’s car. Chavis was subsequently charged with first-degree murder and arson.
In August 2002, Chavis was the first to go on trial for Terry King’s murder. After hearing four days of testimony, the jury deliberated for five hours before announcing that they had reached a verdict. The judge, however, ordered that the verdict be sealed until after Alex and Derek’s trial, scheduled for the following week.
Although the boys had been charged with first-degree murder, the jury was allowed by law to find them guilty of a lesser charge—which they did. Alex and Derek were convicted of second-degree murder, for which they could have been sentenced to 22 years to life in prison. Following the boys’ verdict, the judge unsealed Chavis’s verdict—he had been found not guilty on the murder and arson charges. In another legal proceeding later, Chavis was found guilty of being an accessory after the fact to third-degree murder, tampering with evidence, and false imprisonment involving Alex. He received the maximum sentence of 35 years, and is not scheduled for release until 2037.
In the meantime, Escambia County Circuit Court Judge Frank Bell granted a motion filed by the boys’ attorney to throw out their convictions. Bell ordered the prosecutors and the defense attorneys into mediation to straighten out the cases. He said that if the mediation talks failed, he would order a new trial for the boys. As a basis for his decision, Bell cited the state’s presentation—in the two separate trials—of conflicting evidence regarding who actually wielded the bat.
Fear expressed by the prosecutor that the boys might walk as a result of the judge’s decision never materialized. The case was mediated like the judge had wanted, and both sides reached an agreement—Alex and Derek would plead guilty to third-degree murder and arson in connection with their father’s slaying. Third-degree murder is defined as an unintentional killing that occurred while another felony crime was being committed, in this case battery.
According to the prosecutor, David Rimmer, “you only have to show that the defendant intended to commit the battery.”
Alex was sentenced to seven years in prison, and Derek was sentenced to eight years.
Although Alex has now regained his freedom his brother, Derek, is still imprisoned at the Lancaster Correctional Facility, near Gainesville, a prison for young offenders. Derek is scheduled to be released in May 2009.
Source: www.apakistannews.com
