Adamo said his 300-inmate jail cannot offer proper long-term care for Jordan Brown, of Wampum, who has been charged with using his own 20-gauge shotgun to kill 26-year-old Kenzie Marie Houk. Houk was eight months pregnant with Brown's father's child, and also had two daughters, 7 and 4, who lived in the rural home with the Browns where authorities said she was slain as she lay in bed about 8 a.m. Friday.
The boy then hopped onto a school bus with Houk's oldest daughter, police said. He was picked up from school several hours later after some tree trimmers called 911 when Houk's youngest daughter told them she thought her mother was dead.
The boy has been in the jail some 45 miles northwest of Pittsburgh since early Saturday, Adamo said. He's being held in one of four 10-by-8-foot cells in the jail's booking area, where officials check on him every 15 minutes.
The boy gets the same food as the other inmates, but cannot receive visitors - except for his attorney - because doing so would require him to mingle with adult inmates, Adamo said. Even something as simple as letting the boy shower would require locking down an entire cellblock, most of which hold up to 63 inmates, Adamo said.
Brown's cell has a sink, toilet and a bunk and the inside can be seen from a desk where a booking clerk sits, Adamo said. Brown's attorney, Dennis Elisco, said jail officials can't even find clothes to fit the 4-foot-8 boy.
"They put a shirt on him, he's swimming in it, and his pants are cuffed up about 10 times," Elisco said.
Brown is charged as an adult because Pennsylvania law allows prosecutors to charge children as young as 10 with criminal homicide. Elisco will file motions on Monday asking a judge to move the case to juvenile court and to let the boy's father post bail so he can be freed.
"I don't think anybody wants him there," Elisco said, referring to the county jail.
Elisco said a judge likely won't hear his motions right away. Until then, Elisco hopes to get the fifth-grader's school to send him assignments in jail.
"I want him to be occupied and busy and back, essentially, in school," Elisco said. "I wouldn't say he's in good spirits. He's confused. He looks and acts like a typical 11-year-old."
For now, the boy faces a preliminary hearing on Thursday to determine if he'll stand trial. If a judge agrees the case might belong in juvenile court, a dual-purpose hearing will determine if there's evidence to support the charges, but Elisco will also have to prove the boy can be rehabilitated through a juvenile system that only has jurisdiction until the boy turns 21.
Elisco said the boy has not confessed to the shooting, and he doesn't believe the physical evidence will support the police contention that the boy killed Houk, execution-style, with one shot to the back of her head.
Police and District Attorney John Bongivengo haven't discussed a motive, and Elisco used an expletive to dismiss claims by Houk's family that the boy might have been jealous of Houk.
"I think it's all bull ... there's no animosity," Elisco said.
But two national experts on blended families told the AP the case has all the earmarks of one fueled by the natural tensions that could have occurred as Brown and his father attempted to blend with Houk and her daughters. Brown's father and Houk had been together since May and got engaged in December, her family said.
"It looks awful from the outside and sort of unspeakable, but these are the kinds of feelings that are pretty normal in a new stepfamily. You just hope there's not a loaded gun around," said Patricia Papernow, a psychologist from Hudson, Mass., who heard about the case on the national news.
"I'll bet the boy had some big feelings he didn't know what to do with," said Papernow, author of "Becoming a Stepfamily: Stages of Development in Remarried Families.
Papernow and Jeannette Lofas, a former TV journalist who formed the Stepfamily Foundation as she struggled to deal with her own stepchildren in the 1970s, said most people don't realize how much work it takes to blend two families.
"Two out of three stepfamilies fail," Lofas said. "Would you take your child on a plane to San Francisco with a one-third chance of making it there? That's what millions of people are doing every day when they try to form these families."
"Often kids get quite close or may get close to their parent in that time. When the parent recouples, it's a wonderful thing for the adult, they're gaga in love, but the kids feel kind of left behind," Papernow said.
"Many children feel that," Lofas agreed. "But few act it out to the extent of shooting the stepmother to be. It's just a caricature of what goes on in these situations."
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