By Ryan Sabalow
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
A 48-year-old Bella Vista man accused of stabbing his girlfriend to death on Sunday at their Faith Avenue home allegedly admitted to detectives that he killed her.
Ty Rone Pitts told a detective that he and his girlfriend 24-year-old Randal Leigh Wert had been arguing on Sunday night and "she continued to 'needle' and 'nag'" at him, according to a Shasta County Sheriff's Office investigative report released today.
He responded by pulling an 18-inch "coconut knife" from the top of the refrigerator. He nicked her arm with it, detective Brian Jackson wrote in his report.
"Wert told Pitts she was going to call the cops and he was going to prison," Jackson wrote.
At that point, he stabbed her in the torso, Jackson wrote.
Bleeding profusely, she stumbled another 20-yards and fell over face first.
Pitts told Jackson he went over to her, rolled her over on her back and stabbed her again, Jackson said in his report.
"(He) demonstrated to me that he used a two-handed, downward, plunging-type stab into her chest," Jackson wrote.
He ran off.
Wert's 7-year-old daughter witnessed the stabbing. She told officers who arrived on scene that "dad stabbed mom" and she pointed to the direction he fled, Jackson wrote.
Soon after, Pitts called dispatchers and told them he had stabbed his girlfriend, but he'd dropped the knife by a fence, according to Jackson's report.
A police dog eventually found him.
Pitts was taken to Shasta Regional Medical Center to be treated for dog bites and a cut to his hand, which he said he'd received during the stabbing, Jackson wrote.
The allegations were released today following Pitts' first court appearance in Shasta County Superior Court. His arraignment today was put off until Monday.
He remains in the Shasta County Jail in lieu of $1 million bail. At his hearing, he held a sheet of paper over his face to shield himself from TV cameras and from Wert's friends and family.
Sunday's alleged attack wasn't the first time that Wert's children had witnessed Pitts hurt their mother, detectives say.
Wert also has a 2-year-old son who was home when she was murdered.
Court documents filed in a domestic violence case two years earlier say the girl had told her mother that she loved her after she watched Pitts slam her mother's head into the ground.
In that case, he'd also cut her finger with knife.
He was sentenced to 210 days in jail and placed on probation after being convicted of a single charge of corporal injury to a spouse. Wert had told the detectives who had urged her to leave him that she thought Pitts "was a good man," according to an investigative report.
Two years earlier, Pitts had been arrested on suspicion of domestic violence and assault after he was arrested for hitting Wert in the head with a bottle at a Shasta Lake home.
In that case, he pleaded guilty to assault and was sentenced to 13 days in jail.
1 comment:
2 words: death penalty
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