The home in Duncannon, Pennsylvania, where the shooting of Douglas Dietz occurred (WHTM/YouTube).
An 11-year-old boy fatally shot his adoptive father after the man took away his Nintendo Switch video game console on his birthday, Pennsylvania authorities say.
Clayton Dietz has been charged with criminal homicide in the death of 42-year-old Douglas Dietz, court records reviewed by Law&Crime show. He had a preliminary arraignment on Tuesday evening.
That same day, the father and son were at their home on the first block of South Market Street in Duncannon, a suburb of Harrisburg. And there was another feature to this day relevant to authorities' investigation: it was Clayton Dietz's 11th birthday.
Sometime in the late hours of Monday or the early morning hours of Tuesday, Douglas Dietz had taken away his son's Nintendo Switch, according to court records reviewed by PennLive.com. The family stayed up until midnight to sing "Happy Birthday" to the boy, but then his father told him he needed to go to bed.
This apparently upset the child.
After his parents went to bed and appeared to fall asleep, Clayton Dietz went into their bedroom and, inside a dresser drawer, grabbed the key to his father's safe, the court documents said, believing his video game console might be in there. When he extracted the key, inserted it into the safe, and opened it up, he found a revolver.
According to authorities, he loaded bullets into the gun, pulled back the hammer, walked over to his sleeping father, and fired.
The child's mother awoke to a bang and a smell similar to fireworks, she told police. She tried to nudge her husband awake, but to no avail, the local outlet reported. She then thought she heard water dripping — so she rose to her feet to turn on the light and see what it was.
That is when she reportedly noticed her husband was bleeding from a gunshot wound to the head.
The child apparently realized what he had done around the same time, authorities said. "My dad's dead," he is said to have screamed as he ran downstairs. "I killed my dad. I hate myself."
The boy reportedly had a bloody lip and a contusion above his left eye, though how he got those injuries was not explained.
Police arrived at the home at about 3 a.m. on Tuesday to find Douglas Dietz's body. The wife told officers what she believed happened and what she witnessed. According to PennLive.com, she said that she and her husband adopted their son in 2018 when he was 3 years old and moved to the home on South Market Street in 2023.
Officers also spoke with the child. He allegedly admitted that "he had someone in mind who he was going to shoot" before he shot his father, local CBS affiliate WHP reported. When investigators asked him what he thought would happen when he pulled the trigger, he reportedly replied that he was angry and had not considered that.
Under Pennsylvania law, anyone, regardless of age, who is charged with murder is automatically processed in the adult criminal court system. Court records show Clayton Dietz has a preliminary hearing scheduled for Jan. 22.
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