WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. – A Florida teenager told a friend that he stood behind his mother for about five minutes in contemplation before finally plunging a hammer into her head, according to police documents released Wednesday.
Police said Tyler Hadley, 17, described the attacks to an unidentified friend at the party he threw in his Port St. Lucie home last Saturday night after the killings.
By the friend’s account, when Hadley struck his mother with the hammer, she screamed one final question to her son: “Why?”
When his father walked into the room, Hadley told the friend that they locked eyes before he started beating his father with the hammer, too.
The boy took his parents’ cell phones away ahead of the attack so they couldn’t call for help, according to his friend’s account. When it was over, and the parents were dead, Hadley spent three hours cleaning up the blood, before hosting dozens of friends. Hadley told the friend he was surprised how long the cleanup took.
Hadley is charged with murder in the deaths of Blake and Mary-Jo Hadley and is being held without bond. His public defender, Mark Harllee, entered a written not guilty plea on his client’s behalf Wednesday, but said he couldn’t comment further.
“We’re still looking at all the facts and all the paperwork,” he said.
The lead prosecutor on the case, Tom Bakkedahl, said of the affidavit: “It’s clear to us that there’s sufficient facts to charge with premeditated murder.”
The latest details of the killings are contained within a juvenile arrest affidavit released Wednesday by the Port St. Lucie Police. It was first obtained by Treasure Coast Newspapers.
The friend of Hadley’s, identified only as “MM,” told police he received a call from the suspect Saturday afternoon claiming he planned to kill his parents, a threat he didn’t take seriously because it had been made in the past.
Later that day, the friend told police, Hadley made the same threat again.
At the party that night, Hadley asked the friend to step outside to talk, confessing to the killings, according to the report. When the friend didn’t believe him, Hadley pointed to his parents’ cars parked in the driveway. He still wasn’t convinced.
Hadley then showed his friend a bloody footprint in the garage and, ultimately, the bodies in the bedroom, police said.
Police responded to Hadley’s home early Sunday morning after receiving the tip from his friend. When they arrived, they found a “nervous, frantic and very talkative” Hadley, dressed all in black, with enlarged pupils and “a blank stare.”
Inside, the home was in disarray, according to police, littered with beer bottles and the butts of cigars. Dried blood appeared to be on the frame of the locked master bedroom door. When they got inside, a large amount of blood was seen on the floor and bed sheets.
Dining room chairs, a coffee table, clothing, picture frames, mirrors, bedding, towels and miscellaneous papers were strewn about the room, according to the report. An officer removed two chairs, saw a man’s blood-covered leg, and called for an ambulance.
