Police officials out in one Arizona county were quickly flagged down late into the evening last week by one man who confessed on the spot to the murder of his stepfather.
As stated in a report from the Cochise County Sheriff’s Department, deputies issued 52-year-old Jay Albert Stevens a charge of first-degree murder and processed him into the Cochise County Jail in the wake of allegedly murdering a 61-year-old man at roughly 1 a.m. local time on Thursday.
Authorities stated in their initial report that stevens “indicated that he did not have the address of where the incident occurred, but he was able to lead Deputies to a residence,” where they discovered a man dead.
It was later reported by My Herald/Review Media that Stevens went on to tell the investigators from the sheriff’s office that he had shot his stepfather in the chest two times using a .40 caliber pistol due to the victim accusing him of not reading the Bible, among various other reasons.
“I was gonna bury him, but I’m too lazy to dig a hole that big,” explained Stevens to the police, going on to add that he thought about just chaining the body to the back of his truck and “drag him out into the desert.”
However, instead, authorities found the dead man’s body stashed between the garage and the house.
As read in the investigator’s report obtained by local media outlets, Stevens moved out to Arizona just over four years ago in order to care for his mother. He made the claim that no one at all in the family “liked his stepfather,” before going on to say that he was just an alcoholic that “brainwashed” Stevens’s mom into becoming one, as well.
“This has been building in me for a long time,” stated Stevens. “What I did today was just probably 20 years of (expletive).”
Prior to murdering his stepfather, Stevens informed investigators that the pair had spent a majority of the day drinking alcohol until the subject of conversation swapped over to religion in the garage. The argument escalated rapidly when the stepfather claimed that he did not understand the Bible because he just had not read it enough.
This angered Stevens who went off and “stewed” in his bedroom over the argument for quite some time before he built up the “gumption” to grab a weapon and deal with his stepfather in the living room.
The report stated that Stevens ended up walking up to the man, brandishing the gun “right up to his face,” and yelled at him to “(expletive) off.”
Stevens shot the first round into the man’s chest.
Upon realizing he was still alive, he shot another round into his chest and started to punch the victim repeatedly in the face out of “anger and rage.”
Stevens is being held at the areas county jail on a $1 million bond.