Ohio boy, 10, charged with mom's murder

MILLERSBURG, Ohio — A 10-year-old boy was charged Monday with murder, a crime nearly unheard of at such a young age, after authorities said he told a neighbor about the killing.Paramedics found Deborah McVay, 46, of Big Prairie, lying facedown in her living room Sunday night, dead of a single gunshot wound to her head, Holmes County Sheriff Tim Zimmerly said. Authorities went to the home after a neighbor called a dispatcher to say McVay's son had come to her home and confessed to shooting his mother.

The boy appeared in court Monday with his attorney, Andrew Hyde, who denied the charge. Hyde said he will ask the judge to release the boy to a family member until his trial. He is being held at a juvenile detention center.

Outside McVay's home, another son, Josh Mike, 21, described her as "a very loving lady" who ran her own home health care business and served the mentally disabled. He would not comment about his brother.

The woman's 15-year-old daughter is staying with relatives. It was unknown whether the girl was at home at the time of the shooting or whether McVay was married.

A neighbor, Ron Martin, 43, said he knew the boy. "He wasn't a bad kid, but he has had some problems in the school," he said. "Never anything that you would have dreamed that he would go out and shoot his mother."

About 49 children each year kill their parents, but few are so young, said Kathleen Heide, a criminology professor at the University of South Florida who has studied the crime, called parricide, for more than 30 years. Most children who kill a parent are teenagers, she said. "You rarely, rarely, rarely see cases of kids killing parents who are that young," she said.

From 1976 through 2007, 10 children the same age as the boy killed a parent, she said. In 2008, an 8-year-old Arizona boy killed his father and a friend of the father's.

Holmes County prosecutor Steve Knowling said that in two decades in the county, midway between Cleveland and Columbus, he had not seen a similar case.

"We don't have homicides here, period," he said. "I've got nothing to compare it to."

Knowling said he would not prosecute the boy as an adult.

USA TODAY does not name minors accused of crimes when they are not charged as adults.

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