Just flew mad

  Police pull up in front of the old house on Millwood Avenue. There's been a shooting. "See the man," the dispatcher says.

  The man sitting on the front steps doesn't move. He's staring off into space, seemingly unaware as blue-and-white patrol cars with flashing lights drive into his front yard.

  Police find two bodies in the living room. The man's 17-year-old son is shot in the ear. The man's wife, the boy's mother, is shot in the eye. Both are dead. A uniformed lieutenant knows the man sitting on the front steps and calls him by name: "Sammy! What on earth happened here?"

  There's no attempt to lie. Sammy tells his story: "My boy drops a cigarette on the floor and it rolls under my foot. He leans over and pushes my leg so he can get it. That makes me kindly mad."

  Sammy says he pulled his .22-caliber pistol out of his pocket, stuck it in the boy's ear and pulled the trigger "just one time was all." The boy drops to his knees and falls dead — face down on the living room floor. A deputy coroner says the small caliber bullet literally "tore the boy's brains apart."

  Sammy's wife was sitting on the sofa watching television when all this happened. "What'd you go and do that for?" she shouts at her husband.

  "When she yells at me like that, I just flew mad," Sammy tells the lieutenant. "I point the gun right at her eye and pulls the trigger."

  "I doubt if she ever heard the shot," the deputy coroner comments as he leaves the crime scene.

  The suspect later enters a plea of guilty to double-murder. His only comment to the court before sentencing: "I just get tired of them all the time messin' with me."