A TEEN who killed his dad and kissed his bunny goodbye before shooting dead a six-year-old boy in a school playground is facing life behind bars.
At just 14 years of age, Jesse Osborne fatally shot his dad Jeffrey Osborne in September 2018 before hugging his rabbit and three dogs goodbye and shooting up a nearby school.
Once he had driven to the school, Osborn turned the .40-caliber handgun on a teacher and two pupils, including six-year-old Jacob Hall, who died from his leg wounds three days later.
Prosecutors in South Carolina are hoping to get a life sentence of 30 years without parole as more disturbing details come to light during the first of many sentencing hearings today.
Osborne, now 17, admitted to two counts of murder last December and was subsequently tried as an adult.
He also pleaded guilty to three counts of attempted murder for attempting to shoot two other schoolchildren and and a teacher Meghan Hollingsworth during recess.
Greenville News reported that FBI Special Agent Shandal Ewing testified at the hearing that Osborne had planned the murders at Townville Elementary School days in advance, announcing his plans to “kill around 50 or 60” people in a secret “true crime” Instagram community.
The South Carolina newspaper also revealed that alarming video footage of Osborne was shown during the hearing, taken three hours before the merciless rampage.
In it, he could be seen combing his hair, and saying “gotta get your hair straight when you are going to shoot a place up” and telling his pet rabbit Floppy that he was “going to miss you.”
I think I’ll probably most likely kill around 50 or 60 people
Jesse Osborne
Likewise, Anderson County Sheriff’s Office Detective McKindra Bibb, who used data from the teenager’s phone to find evidence, testified that Osborne conducted extensive searches for information on mass shootings in the month before shooting his father three times as he sat in a chair in their family home.
Bibb said searches on Osborne’s browser history included extensive research on the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting by Adam Lanza, who killed 20 children and six adults in Connecticut.
According to the shocking confession transcript, Osborne said his dad had drinking and was “fussing” at him and his mum the night before the shooting. His dad reportedly had convictions for domestic abuse, possessing marijuana and had been declared bankrupt. Osborne told the detectives interviewing him that his dad’s giving him a hard time for not doing his math homework the following day was the last straw.
“That’s the point where I went into his drawer and loaded his gun,” the teen said, before revealing that he had “shot every gun in the house” with his parents.
In his confession, Osborne said that years of relentless bullying since Fifth Grade had left him feeling disliked and isolated by his peers; he said it was the school itself he had an issue with rather than the schoolchildren themselves.
Osborne admitted that he thought about slaying students at the middle school he was suspended from after he had shown up there with a hatchet and a machete. Reports indicate that he decided against it because the middle school has “tons of cops” unlike the vulnerable elementary school.
A sentencing judge must weigh up Osborne’s age, maturity, and the circumstances of the killings he carried out, reports WYFF News 4.
