Town note
Started as a mining and prospecting town; gold and silver were discovered in the mountains in the 1860s.
about 0:06:44The story
Eldon Gale Samuel Jr., known to his family as Junior, married Tina McCurdy in 1998 at the Alpine Meadows wedding chapel and settled in Modesto, California. He already had a son, Anthony, from an earlier relationship, and the couple went on to have two boys: Eldon Gale Samuel III, born in 1999, and Jonathan, born about eleven months later. Jonathan was severely autistic and needed a great deal of care. In 2001 Samuel ran for a seat on the Modesto city council, saying that too much growth had changed the town and that he wanted to help the elderly and homeless and support the police and fire services. He lost.
Over the following years the family fell apart. Tina was hurt in a car accident and began abusing pain pills; Samuel injured his shoulder at work and became addicted to the same drugs. The couple shopped from doctor to doctor: between 2003 and 2013 Samuel obtained at least 562 prescriptions from 36 doctors, including more than 19,000 doses of hydrocodone. They were evicted repeatedly and moved from one cockroach-infested rental to another with the two boys. Samuel grew violent. He once doused Tina in lighter fluid and threatened to burn her alive in front of the children while demanding the settlement from her accident. Two years later he ran her down with the car and broke her collarbone, with the boys watching. Four years after that he held a gun to her head, bound her to a chair with duct tape and forced Eldon III, then a small boy, to urinate on her. Eldon III later said his father punched him, beat him with coat hangers until the marks kept him out of school, and smashed his toys and the Lego models he had built. Neighbours called child protective services many times, but the episode says nothing was done.
By the mid-2000s Samuel had become convinced that a zombie apocalypse was not merely possible but inevitable. He taught Eldon III to shoot them in the head and cut off their heads, trained him on first-person shooter games and zombie films, took the family on camping trips where the boys practised with knives and guns, and kept a camp trailer packed with weapons, tinned food, water and clothing so that they could flee into the mountains at a moment's notice. He carried a nine-millimetre handgun in his waistband and nailed the back door shut at home to slow the zombies down. Tina said the household lived in fear of the dead rising.
In May 2012 Tina and Samuel separated for good. Samuel took custody of the boys and moved them to Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, to be near his father, while Tina stayed in Modesto. The family arrived with almost nothing and were housed by St Vincent de Paul of Northern Idaho, first in a temporary place at North First Street while the charity looked for permanent accommodation. In the autumn of 2013 police were called to the emergency room after Samuel was found unconscious from pills; four days later Eldon III found his father slumped in the front yard, incoherent, and called the police himself. On 24 March 2014, a Monday, Eldon III went to the doctor and was prescribed Prozac. That evening neighbours saw Samuel pacing the yard, staring into space, hiding behind bushes and firing a .45 into the air. He told his son that the zombie apocalypse had started and that they had to flee. He pushed or hit the boy in the chest and ordered him to take off his clothes and leave the house.
Eldon III picked up the .45 and shot his father in the stomach. Samuel fell and began crawling towards the bedrooms, leaving a trail of blood. Eldon III said later that he thought his father was turning into a zombie, so he shot him three more times, twice in the cheek and once in the temple, in Jonathan's room. Jonathan had hidden under his bed. Eldon III told him to come out, and when he would not, he fetched a shotgun and fired into the bed, reloaded and fired again. He then took a knife and a machete and hacked at his brother through the wooden slats, somewhere between fifty and a hundred times. The autopsy found that Jonathan died from the second or third shotgun wound and that most of the cutting came afterwards. Eldon III called 911 calmly and said he had shot his brother and his father. Police arrived at about 9.30 that night to find him at the front door covered in blood, with Jonathan's body laid across his father's legs.
At the police station he was photographed and swabbed, then interviewed by Detective Wilhelm, who had been his school resource officer, and Sergeant McCormick. He first said his father had killed Jonathan and that he had shot his father to protect his brother. After about two hours he admitted killing both. He said he had thought about killing Jonathan for months, that he hated his brother, blamed him for his mother leaving and for his father's addiction, and that if Jonathan had not been there the family would have been happy. He also said he liked playing as Trevor in Grand Theft Auto because Trevor had anger issues and liked shooting people. Tests found six drugs in his father's system, including a blackout level of Ambien, and a hair sample from Eldon III showed chronic use of Benadryl and Celexa, which he had not been prescribed.
Because he was fourteen, the state would not hold him with other juveniles and would not put him in the adult population. His defence was that he killed his father in self-defence and his brother in a rage, which would be manslaughter. A defence psychiatrist, Dr Beaver, testified that Eldon III had been traumatised and abused, had a reactive attachment disorder, and could not appreciate his Miranda rights or form the intent to kill his brother.
Staff described a boy who had gained forty pounds in custody, was earning school credits and had begun to make eye contact. With credit for time served, his earliest release date is 2034.