A Minnesota man is accused of murdering his father ‘execution-style’ in front of his uncle and another man as they finished eating dinner on Friday.
Police in the rural town of Hinckley said they received a call at 8.44pm from a man who reported that two men came into his home and claimed that Kirk Hazlett III, 31, had just shot his father, Kirk Hazlett II, at the cabin next door, Law and Crime reports.
Deputies from the Pine County Sheriff’s Office then had to drive one and a half miles down a dirt road to access the elder’s hunting cabin on Barns Spring Road, where they found him lying down on the floor near the couch with a ‘large amount of blood pooling on the ground near his head,’ according to court documents obtained by the Kansas City Star.
There were several spent casings of ammunition on the ground next to the body, Fox 9 reports.
A postmortem examination revealed that Hazlett II suffered from nine gunshot wounds – one of which entered his head above the left ear and exited at the right forehead.
All of the entrance wounds were from the back, suggesting his son shot him from behind.
Police said they then spoke to the two witnesses to the murder, who said they were having dinner when one of them – Hazlett II’s brother – received a notification on his cellphone from the trail camera at the entrance to the property that showed someone walking up the driveway with a gun.
‘Holy s***, someone just walked through our gate with a pistol in their hand,’ the brother reportedly warned.
He then went to retrieve his handgun from one of the rooms in the cabin, but as he was getting the weapon, Hazlett III allegedly ‘busted through’ the side door of the cabin and the brother heard three gunshots.
The brother said he then saw his nephew standing inside the cabin with a handgun.
The victim was still ‘breathing a little bit’ at that point, as the suspect made his uncle and the other witness sit on the couch, they claimed.
He then allegedly stood over his father and ‘shot him in the head execution-style’ to ‘make sure’ he would not survive.
One of the witnesses later reported that Hazlett III ‘entered [the cabin] with a mission… He entered to kill him.’
The suspect ultimately let his uncle and the other witness go after they pleaded for their lives and he took their cellphones, police say.
That is when they ran to a neighboring property to call for help.
Meanwhile, Hazlett III called authorities about half an hour later to report an unrelated incident, the Kansas City Star reports.
He was arrested at his home in Cambridge at around 9.18pm, allegedly wearing the same clothes he donned to kill his father.
A motive for the shooting remains unclear, but both witnesses said Hazlett III an d his father ‘weren’t getting along and hadn’t for a long time, adding that he was ‘not in good relations with their family.’
Hazlett III’s girlfriend also said he and the family ‘don’t see eye-to-eye.’
In fact, law enforcement was called to the same cabin just about one month prior to the shooting, on October 17, when the elder Hazlett reported that his son had been drinking and was threatening him.
The witnesses to Friday’s crime, though, said the suspect appeared ‘very coherent’ during the shooting and ‘didn’t appear under the influence of any suspect.’
He is now being held at Pine County Jail on a $3million bond as he faces charges of second-degree murder and felony kidnapping.
