Authorities in a Florida county say a father has been left “absolutely shattered” after he shot and killed his older son in an effort to save his younger son’s life, with the sheriff’s office saying the move was justified based on evidence.
The incident occurred in the Florida Club community on Sunday morning. The Martin County Sheriff’s office said later that day they had received a call from a woman reporting her son was “acting irrational” and intervention was needed by police.
Minutes later as deputies had been dispatched, they received another call from the woman saying her husband had shot their older son, 30-year-old Joseph Maloney, “following a violent altercation” between him and his brother James, 26.
Witness statements, police say, show that older brother had been acting irrationally for about eight hours and the pair had been consuming alcohol throughout the evening.
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“The physical altercation began over a game of pool then escalated into a violent attack of one brother on another,” Sheriff William Snyder said Sunday, stating Joseph had at one point put James in a choke hold.
“At one point, the parents heard the younger son pleading for his brother to stop choking him because he could not breathe.”
Snyder said he “verbally intervened” to try and get Joseph off of James, but he continued strangling James while holding what is believed to be a butterfly knife close to him.
He said as the younger sibling was beginning to lose consciousness and all other attempts to stop the “attack” had been made, father John Maloney “fired his revolver hitting his older son multiple times.”
“I’m not sure what the dad could’ve done. He was yelling at him to ‘stop, stop.’ I guess he could’ve jumped in but of course, he would have been at risk to himself.”
On arrival, authorities interviewed witnesses in the house and said each statement corroborated one another.
According to Snyder, the statements and physical evidence indicate that at the time of the incident, the father believed deadly force was necessary to prevent death or serious injury to his younger son.
The father, John, had not been arrested or charged as of Sunday night, with the sheriff’s office saying he was justified in using deadly force to defend someone else’s life.
“Whatever you can do to defend yourself, you can defend someone else,” Snyder said.
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Asked about why Joseph had been acting irrationally, the sheriff said it’s alleged that in addition to the alcohol use, there was an upcoming court case that may have caused “some pressure.”
CBS-affiliate WPEC reports three years ago Joseph had hit and killed a local football coach while driving drunk and had been charged with manslaughter in connection with the crash and was to appear in court in January 2019.
The sheriff said he had spoken with John Maloney, the father, when he attended the scene and said he was “shattered.”
“I don’t know that there’s any way that I could adequately describe the look on his face, his wife, the mother. There were pictures in the home. It looked to me to be an everyday family,” he said. “They just seemed like a normal family … and he was shattered.”
The investigation is ongoing.
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