Samuel confesses in police interrogation video

COEUR d'ALENE — Jurors Thursday got a glimpse of Eldon G. Samuel III himself describing what happened inside the house where he was living with his brother and father when he killed them both on the night of March 24, 2014.

Jurors watched Samuel, then a 14-year-old Lakes Magnet Middle School student who had just committed the grisly killings, speak with two detectives in a video-recorded police interrogation at the Coeur d'Alene Police Department. The jurors were handed transcripts of the interrogation to follow along with the dialogue.

Samuel quietly told the investigators that his father, 46-year-old Eldon Samuel Jr., had been outside their home earlier in the night shooting a gun, believing zombies were roaming near the house.

"He told me to get out" of the house, Samuel said.

The boy refused and he said his father hit him in the chest.

"He hit me hard," he said.

Samuel secured a .45-caliber handgun. The house was loaded with several guns, knives and other weapons, along with stocks of ammunition.

"He hit me again and I shot him," he said.

His father was shot in the middle of his abdomen and crawled through house, bleeding. His father made his way to 13-year-old brother Jonathan's bedroom. The brother was hiding under a bed.

"Don't forget to breathe for me," one of the interrogators, Jason Wilhelm, told Samuel as he relayed the violent details.

Samuel would eventually fire three rounds into his father's head. Police later found his father's dead body in a sitting position on the floor, his back leaning against a nightstand that was next to his brother's bed. His brother's body was found partially under the bed and partially in his father's lap.

"I told John to get out," Samuel recalled.

His brother, who was autistic, didn't want to go.

"I just wanted him out," he added.

At this point in the interrogation Samuel starts blaming his father for shooting his brother. He said his father, who was wounded with the round to his abdomen, fired a shotgun at his brother's legs.

"(Jonathan) yelped, 'aah my leg,'" Samuel said.

Earlier in the night, Samuel had called 911 to report killing both.

"Your dad did this even though he was shot?" said the other interrogator, Brandon McCormick, questioning Samuel's account.

Samuel would later correct this account and admit to shooting the brother, too, and hacking at his head with a machete. His defense team at trial is conceding he killed both, and challenging the case based on his state of mind at the time.

The interrogation video runs nearly five hours. Jurors will continue watching it today in the Kootenai County 1st District Court double-murder trial.