By JOEL D. SAWYER Middle Tyger Bureau
A 12-year-old boy has confessed to shooting his grandparents to death and subsequently torching their West Chester house, Chester County Sheriff Robert Benson said Friday.
The boy, whose name cannot be released because of his age, was charged Thursday with arson and two counts of murder after hunters found him and his grandparents' missing sport-utility vehicle in rural Cherokee County.
Authorities say they're stumped to find a motive in the killings, and those who knew the family are puzzled, as well.
The boy came to live with his paternal grandparents, Joe and Joy Pittman, in late October. He had been living with his parents in Florida and had begun to develop some behavioral problems, said Chris Snelgrove, pastor at New Hope Methodist Church, where the Pittmans attended. "When they found out he was beginning to have problems, they immediately volunteered to go down there and get him," Snelgrove said.
Snelgrove described the boy as a bright, loving young man. He said the boy had been to his house several times to play with his own son, also 12.
"This has to be some catastrophic psychological thing that happened. This had to be a medically ..." Snelgrove said, trailing off.
"(He) is a good young man," he said. "There's not an answer that can just be posted on this."
According to Chester County coroner Watson Right, Joe and Joy Pittman each died Thursday from a close-range shotgun blast.
Joe Pittman, 66, was shot near the mouth, while Joy, 62, was shot in the back of the head, Right said. Investigators said after killing his grandparents, the boy set their home on fire and drove off in his grandfather's Nissan Pathfinder.
He told the two men who found him in Cherokee County that he had been kidnapped.
Benson said his office is not yet releasing any information on a possible motive. The Pittmans' neighbor, Roger Price, called 911 when he saw the home burning. He said he could never have imagined what investigators later found inside.
"I didn't know the kid that well because he had just moved here. The family -- they were good people," Price said.
"You hardly ever hear of something like that happening. This is a quiet place," he said.
Helen Yarborough, who has lived in West Chester all her life, said she can remember only one other local event as tragic.
In 1970, Robert Gibson murdered his two young nephews and shot their mother, his sister, not far from where Yarborough lives.
Gibson is serving a life sentence.
"That little boy came and stayed with (his grandparents) every summer. As far as we knew, everything was fine," Yarborough said.
Yarborough said she often saw Joe Pittman teaching the boy to drive the Pathfinder he drove to Cherokee County Thursday.
"It's got us real upset -- we just don't know how to accept things like that," Yarborough said. "They were good, Christian people."
The boy could be free in nine years.
"The most he can get out of it (if he's tried as a juvenile) is a juvenile facility until he's 17, and transferred to an adult facility until he's 21," Benson said. (Can't he get death row? See below)
When charged with murder, state law does not specify a minimum age for someone to be tried as an adult.
But according to assistant attorney general David Avant, the S.C. Supreme Court ruled in early 2000 that a 12-year-old, referred to in court documents as "Corey B," could be tried as an adult on two murder charges.
A family court judge will decide whether to hand the case over to a general sessions court to try the boy as an adult. The youth will appear in court Monday.
As of March 2001, four inmates on South Carolina death row were tried as adults and convicted of murder while still juveniles, the youngest of whom was 16 when the crime was committed.
Avant said he knew of no specific state law preventing a 12-year-old from facing the death penalty, but that there may be U.S. Supreme Court decisions that would prevent a prosecutor from seeking that penalty.
News research manager Chandra Pierce and The Associated Press contributed to this report. Joel Sawyer can be reached at (864) 877-3225, 574-5980 or at joel.sawyer@shj.com.