Episode 22: Welcome to Pushing Up Lilies, I’m your host Julie Mattson. On today’s episode, we finish off our ‘Deaths During the Holidays Series’ with one of the most horrific holiday crimes. On New Years Eve in 2014, a son attacked his mother at their home and decapitated her with an ax, because she “nagged him” to do the chores.

Listen in…

SHOWNOTES:

•  I’ve found a New Year’s Eve murder story that I thought that you all would be super interested in. I was thinking about it as I was going through all of the history of this particular story. I can remember growing up how mad I used to get. Did you all have chores? I had so many chores and I did not get allowance. A lot of my friends would have certain chores that they’d have to do certain days of the week. I was always jealous because at the age of 10, 11, 12, they always had money in their pocket. I didn’t understand. My parents felt like chores were something that had to be done and that were not optional. You did not get rewarded for finishing them, for finishing them early or overachieving. There was no reward. We hated it. It was not fun. I can remember even as I got older, I would be forced to finish chores before dates. I used to get so mad because my poor dates would sit on the couch waiting for me to finish laundry before my mom would let me leave. It does make you angry when someone pesters you to do something. This story is real similar to what some of us have experienced growing up, but we didn’t quite push it to this extreme, obviously. (02:14)

•  So it was December 31st of 2014. Maria, the mom, dropped the daughter, Maria, off at work. When she came back, Mario, the brother, heard a thump in the garage and he knew that his mom and Christian had gone in there to get the boxes down from the attic. Finally, Christian decided he was going to do what his mom wanted him to do. Now Mario heard this thump and he didn’t hear any yelling or screaming, which you would expect to hear if there was an altercation going on in the next room. So he figured that the boxes had fallen from the attic or someone had dropped one and so the thump didn’t really startle him at all. One of mom’s friends had arrived shortly after this and saw Christian in the garage with a mop, a broom, and a bucket. He looked to be mopping up what she thought was red paint. Often, blood is mistaken for red paint. Not really expecting there to be blood in the garage, she just assumed that it was paint that had spilled and that Christian was in there trying to clean it up. So the friend called Maria, the mom, to tell her that Christian was acting strangely, and got her voicemail obviously. She left a voicemail whenever Maria didn’t answer. Mario eventually got up. He was on the couch in the living room and noticed that his mom hadn’t returned to her room and that Christian had not come back into the house. So he kind of was wondering, hey, what’s going on out there? He opened the garage door from the house and saw a puddle of blood, which the friend had mistaken for paint, and saw an axe leaning against the wall. (06:07)

•  There were a lot of problems with Christian. He thought that his mother favored his older brother over him. One of the main reasons for that is because the older brother Mario did not live at home and he only came home during the holidays. And so, during that time of year, she did spend maybe a little more time with him just because that was their only chance to visit. Christian lived at home. Maria, the daughter, also lived at home. So the mom, Maria, really enjoyed the time that she got to spend with Mario during the holidays when he was visiting. Now Christian, he liked to be alone. He liked to play video games and he would sit outside for hours and stare at the sky. He also, in looking at his past, had been arrested for loitering, for prowling, and also for resisting an officer. He had been previously diagnosed with schizophrenia and he would occasionally, in the middle of the night while he was sleeping, hear voices from under his bed. (08:33)

•  And Christian’s condition seemed to worsen just days before New Year’s Eve. Again, when Mario would come to visit around the holidays, the two would argue often. And the main reason was because Christian was jealous of Mario. He would stay in his room most of the time when Mario would visit. I found it interesting that when the police did arrive on scene, they actually found Maria’s head in the trash can. After, they found her body lying next to it. Of course, they questioned Christian, who said that he did spend two days plotting his mother’s murder. He did confess and told police that he finished her off and swung the ax at her like a baseball bat. This was well planned out with no previous discussion with his therapist and no indication that he was going to do this to his mother. And keep in mind, and we see this a lot with mental illness, where the parents really go above and beyond to try to do everything that they can for the child. Somehow it just doesn’t work out. Maybe they can’t afford to put them in an inpatient facility where they really need to be. There’s not a lot of assistance. We all know that mental health is a huge problem, not just in Florida where this occurred, but all over the world. There was no indication that he had planned on doing this. Although mom, well, everyone in the home I guess you could say, was a little bit scared of him, because he heard voices. Who knew what the voices were telling him? Who knew in the middle of the night while he was in his bed and heard voices under it, what were the voices telling him to do? (11:14)

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