As his grandfather lay dead and bloodied on the front porch of their Lake County, Fla., home on Saturday, Kolby Allen Parker stood nearby talking to sheriff’s deputies about what had happened that evening. Suddenly, he reached both hands into his front pockets.
Police soon confirmed the ears belonged to his 77-year-old grandfather, Ronal Wells Sr., and said Parker had beaten, stabbed, and mutilated Wells after the pair got into a fight while smoking marijuana.
Investigators also found another unsettling item in Parker’s bedroom: An apron hanging on his wall that said “The Family Butcher,” with two plastic, bloody human ears attached.
Parker, 30, was charged with second-degree murder and assaulting an officer on Saturday. He is being held without bond in Lake County Jail, according to police. A lawyer for Parker was not listed in court documents.
After receiving a call of a reported stabbing on Saturday evening, sheriff’s deputies arrived at Parker’s DeLand, Fla., home at around 6:40 p.m. to find him standing on the porch with bloodstained hands and arms next to his grandfather’s maimed body.
Police asked Parker to wait outside while they confirmed his grandfather was dead. They found Wells with several stab wounds and his ears cut off, police said.
Parker, meanwhile, told officers that after getting into an argument, Wells “came at him” with a knife. He claimed he was able to wrestle it away from his grandfather and proceeded to stab him in the “heart.”
When a sheriff’s deputy asked Parker if he had any weapons, he said, “Yes,” police wrote in the arrest report. But after doing a pat-down, police couldn’t find any weapons, “only an unknown object in each pocket.”
“This object was soft to the touch while being firm,” police wrote, but they didn’t remove them.
The officer then asked Parker if he knew the whereabouts of his uncle, Ronal Wells Jr.
“Yes,” he said, sticking his hands in his front pockets.
“This is where he is,” he added, pulling out the ears.
(The ears belonged to Parker’s grandfather and not his uncle. Ronal Wells Jr. was not harmed in the incident).
Parker then tried to steal an officer’s gun and Taser, police said, and kicked and head-butted three officers as they attempted to restrain him and place him under arrest. Police tried to use a Taser on him, but it wasn’t effective, according to the arrest report.
He was taken to a hospital, and then transferred to a county jail. Parker’s next court date is April 5, according to jail records.
Once detectives arrived on the scene with a search warrant, they found evidence that seemed to contradict Parker’s story that his grandfather had attacked him — including an aluminum baseball bat stained with blood that was resting in the corner of the porch.
Detectives also noted gashes on Wells’s arms that were consistent with defensive wounds. When they entered the kitchen, they found a large kitchen knife with a wooden handle on the table. The knife was dripping blood onto the floor, according to arrest records.
After his arrest, police say Parker admitted in a sworn statement that he struck his grandfather in the head with the bat until he fell to the ground.
“The suspect admitted to retrieving a butcher knife from the table and stabbing the victim in the neck and chest multiple times,” a detective wrote in an affidavit.
Parker also confessed that he cut off his grandfather’s ears, but denied cutting his arms.
When asked why he did it, Parker allegedly told investigators that he “wanted his grandfather to be with his deceased grandmother.”
“It was his time to go,” he said.