 |
||||||||
 |
||||||||
|
||||||||
|
Mom seeks answers in murder-suicide
By RYAN DAVIS, Times Staff Writer HUDSON -- Her 6-year-old son was two hours overdue. Six times, Debra DiBenedetto called her ex-husband, who had Cody for the weekend. No answer. About 8 p.m. Sunday, she drove from Spring Hill to her ex-husband's house in Hudson and knocked on the door. Again, no answer. So she peeked in the bedroom window: "It looked like they were sleeping," she said. "I started banging on the window. I wondered why no one was moving. "Then I saw the blood on my son." She broke the window and started screaming. A neighbor ran to her aid. Pasco County sheriff's deputies responded to the home at 7308 Country Club Drive. They say Stephen DiBenedetto, 39, apparently shot his son in the head with a silver revolver. Then he killed himself. At 8:52 p.m. Sunday, paramedics pronounced father and son dead. Cody lived with his mother in Spring Hill. He often visited his father on the weekends, leaving Saturday morning and returning by 6 p.m. Sunday. The kindergartener at Deltona Elementary School liked to eat cookies after school, play Donkey Kong on the computer and dance like the characters in Austin Powers movies, his mother said. His father bought him a VCR for Christmas. Debra DiBenedetto last spoke to him when he woke shortly before 3 a.m. Saturday. "Mommy's going to work. Go back to bed," she said. Then she tucked Cody in. Shortly before his father came to get him Saturday, Cody turned to his mother's boyfriend and said something he had never said before. "I don't want to go with Daddy," he told Joseph Gilmore, his mother's live-in boyfriend. His mother isn't sure why he said that, but she thinks Cody was having fun at home and didn't want to leave. She said he loved his father. Cody's father has no Florida criminal record, documents show, but Debra DiBenedetto said there have been problems. In 1997, just months after the couple completed a four-hour course at Pasco-Hernando Community College entitled "Divorce and its Impact on Children" -- she received a domestic violence injunction against her ex-husband. She said he threatened to kill her if he couldn't see their now 11-year-old daughter, Ryann. The situation calmed until last summer. Then, she said, he hit her and threatened to kill their children if he couldn't see them. She said she went before Circuit Judge Curtis Neal in Hernando County during June and asked for a protection order. She said she got the order for her, but not her children. She said Stephen was ordered to give up his gun and attend anger management classes. He rarely saw Ryann, but six weeks later he started seeing Cody again, she said. "I figured they got his gun, he's going to classes, he's okay." But on Monday she was looking for answers from Neal and the Department of Children and Families. "All these people investigated him," Debra DiBenedetto said, "and now my son's dead." DCF has had one abuse report involving the DiBenedettos, spokeswoman Renea Marcano said. "At the moment, that's all we can state," she said. Debra DiBenedetto said she and her ex-husband had not argued recently, but she said he might have felt threatened after her boyfriend moved in about a month ago and Cody enjoyed his company. All week, Debra DiBenedetto wondered if her ex-husband was up to something, she said. He asked her to pack extra clothes for Cody and she wondered if he would attempt to run away with the boy. She packed the regular amount of clothes. But no matter how she looks at the past week, Debra DiBenedetto said she can't see any clues of what was coming. Deputies said Stephen DiBenedetto didn't leave a suicide note. "I didn't think he would actually hurt his son," she said, "because he really did love him." -- Staff writers Jamie Jones and Matthew Waite and researchers John Martin and Cathy Wos contributed to this report.
 © 2006 • All Rights Reserved • St. Petersburg Times
490 First Avenue South • St. Petersburg, FL 33701 • 727-893-8111 
|
From today's Hernando Times |
