In re Interest of J.B.

189 A.3d 390

IN the INTEREST OF: J.B.

Appeal of: J.B.

No. 31 WAP 2017

Supreme Court of Pennsylvania.

Argued: November 29, 2017

Decided: July 18, 2018

Stephen Domenic Colafella, Esq., Law Office of Stephen D. Colafella, Katherine Eisenhauer Burdick, Esq., Dennis Anthony Elisco, Esq., for J.A.B., Appellant.

Gregory Joseph Simatic, Esq., for Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Appellee.

SAYLOR, C.J., BAER, TODD, DONOHUE, DOUGHERTY, WECHT, MUNDY, JJ.

OPINION

JUSTICE TODD

J.B., a juvenile, appeals from the Superior Court's order affirming the dispositional order of the juvenile court entered after its adjudication of J.B. delinquent of the offenses of first-degree murder and homicide of an unborn child in connection with the shooting death of his stepmother inside their family home on the morning of February 20, 2009. J.B. asserts that there was insufficient evidence to support his adjudication of delinquency beyond a reasonable doubt for these offenses, and, alternatively, that the juvenile court's adjudication was against the weight of the evidence. Our careful review of the evidentiary record in this matter compels our conclusion that the evidence introduced at his adjudicatory hearing was insufficient, as a matter of law, to establish his delinquency for these offenses beyond a reasonable doubt. As a result, we are obligated to reverse the Superior Court's order which affirmed the juvenile court's order of disposition for these offenses.

I. Factual Background

In our prior opinion in this matter, In re J.B. , 630 Pa. 124, 106 A.3d 76 (2014) (" In re J.B. II "), we recounted the factual circumstances surrounding the criminal offenses for which J.B. was adjudicated delinquent. As these facts must be scrutinized as part of our consideration of J.B.'s present claims, we set forth those facts from that opinion in full:

During February 2009, C.B. (an adult male), along with his fiancée — K.M.H ("the victim") — her two daughters, J.H. (age 7) and A.H. (age 4), and C.B.'s 11-year-old son J.B. were living together in a two-story rented house. The house was located in a rural area surrounded by farmland and woods, and situated near the town of Wampum, Pennsylvania. During the predawn hours on the morning of Friday, February 20, 2009, C.B. left the house to go to work. According to C.B., it had snowed overnight, and at the time he was leaving — 6:45 a.m. — there was snow on the ground. N.T. Adjudication Hearing, 4/11/12, at 147. C.B. recalled that he departed in his usual fashion by backing his vehicle out of a parking area adjoining the rear of the house and onto the long driveway which led from a combination storage barn and garage complex ("garage") located behind the house to the nearby thoroughfare of Wampum-New Galilee Road ("road").¹ He arrived at work approximately fifteen minutes later at around 7:00 a.m. Id. at 146.

Later that morning, J.B. came downstairs from his upstairs bedroom in the house to get dressed for school. Id. at 68. During this period of time, C.B. and the victim — who was then over 8 months' pregnant — had been in the process of relocating the contents of their shared bedroom on the first floor of their home to J.B.'s upstairs bedroom, attached to which was another smaller bedroom they had previously converted into a nursery for use once their baby was born. N.T. Adjudication Hearing, 4/10/12, at 108; 4/11/12, at 68-69. This shared bedroom was located in the front of the house directly to the right of the front door. N.T. Adjudication Hearing, 4/10/12, at 95.

In preparation for the final move, which was to take place during the upcoming weekend, some of J.B.'s personal belongings, including his clothes, had already been placed downstairs inside of the shared first floor bedroom. N.T. Adjudication Hearing, 4/11/12, 68-69. After awakening, J.B. went downstairs, entered that bedroom, where the victim was sleeping at the time, retrieved his clothes, and got dressed in a nearby bathroom. Id. at 69. After dressing, J.B. sat on the couch with J.H. and watched television. Id. A.H. was still asleep. Id. at 66. J.B. recalled that while he and J.H. were watching television, he heard the victim click her cell phone — either open or shut — which he presumed was her checking the time. Immediately thereafter, the victim called out to them that "they needed to leave or they would be late for the bus." Id. at 70. J.B. and J.H. left the house one or two minutes later, which J.B. estimated was around 8:13-8:14 a.m., since both children normally caught the school bus that transported them to Mohawk Elementary School around 8:12 a.m. every morning. Id. at 89. As J.B. exited the house, he noticed a large black truck parked by the garage.² N.T. Adjudication Hearing, 4/11/12, at 65-66.

The driver of the school bus which arrived to pick up the children noted that, when he first saw J.B. and J.H., they had made it a third of the way down the driveway, and were walking toward the road, with J.B. a little bit ahead of J.H. N.T. Adjudication Hearing, 4/10/12, at 152. Once the children saw the school bus, however, the driver recalled they both began to run down the driveway toward the bus with J.B. outpacing J.H. by about ten yards during the run. Id. at 153. As they ran towards the bus, the driver did not notice anything unusual in the way the children were acting, and, at no time while he was watching them, did he observe them leave the driveway, or throw anything. Id. at 154, 156. Once the children got to the bus, they each took their respective assigned seats, as per their normal routine. Id. at 153-54. The bus driver recalled observing nothing out of the ordinary about the children's behavior after they had gotten on the bus and during the time they were being transported to school. Id.

Approximately 45 minutes after the children got on the school bus — shortly after 9:00 a.m. — a six-person work crew from a tree service company arrived at the premises to finish collecting firewood they had cut and collected the previous day from the wooded area located in front of the house. Id. at 13, 19, 29. The crew came in three trucks, with the lead truck driven by the owner of the business — Gary Cable — entering the driveway first. Cable and his workers parked their trucks between the front of the house and the woods line which was also in front of the house, but closer to the road. Cable and his crew remained in that area all day. Id. at 18. Cable remembered that there was a "light" coating of snow at the time on the ground, which he estimated was approximately 1/8-1/4 of an inch in depth. Id. at 20. Cable did not recall seeing any tire tracks in the driveway on his arrival, although he did note that the center of the driveway was "humped up" when he pulled in. Id. at 22, 31.³

Cable and his crew began working, after which one of his workers came to him and reported seeing the screen door to one of the entrances to the house standing open. Id. at 23. Cable told the worker that he would keep an eye on it. Id. Approximately ten minutes later, Cable noticed the door open again and observed a little girl — A.H. — crying; whereupon, Cable went up to the porch to see what was the matter.⁴ A.H. told Cable that "her mother was dead." Id. at 25. Cable called 911 and sent one of his workers — Gary Suhanec — to the end of the driveway to flag down the state police officers who had been dispatched. Cable, without entering the house, attempted to console A.H. by speaking to her through the door, and Cable instructed her to get her blanket from the couch and come over to the door so he could talk to her and keep her calm. Id. at 26-27.

While waiting for the police to arrive, Suhanec called Cable on his cellphone and informed him there were footprints on the driveway. Id. at 37. It was at that point that Cable observed two sets of small footprints in the center of the driveway between "[w]here the tire tracks run on either side of the driveway." Id. at 38, 40. Cable estimated this was approximately 45 minutes after he arrived — around 9:45 a.m. Id. at 36.

The first state police officers — Troopers Harry Gustafson and Corporal Jeremy Bowser — arrived on the scene at 10:13 a.m. Id. at 43-46. Trooper Gustafson encountered A.H., who was crying, at the front door. He picked her up and then took her into the residence and sat her on the couch to watch television. Upon entering the residence through the front door, he immediately saw the body of the victim lying on her left side on the bed in the bedroom with a "very large" pool of blood by her head and upper shoulders and soaking the sheet beneath. Id. at 49, 71. Troopers Gustafson and Bowser engaged in emergency ventilation measures until paramedics arrived.

During the performance of these resuscitative efforts, the school nurse called the victim's cell phone requesting to speak to her. Trooper Gustafson answered the phone, identified himself, and talked to the nurse, who indicated that J.B. was in her office because he was not feeling well and that he was requesting to come home for the day. Id. at 59-60. Trooper Gustafson asked the nurse to "baby-sit" J.B. until they could make arrangements to have someone pick him up. Id. at 60.

The paramedics arrived at around 10:40 a.m. and began to examine the victim. Id. at 85. During the examination, one of the paramedics noted a gunshot wound to the back of her head. Id. at 81-82. The paramedics could not detect any life signs from the victim, nor any fetal heartbeat. Id. at 81. At this point, other crime scene investigators from the Pennsylvania State Police and the Lawrence County Coroner's Office were sent to the scene, after which the victim and her unborn fetus were pronounced dead. In a short period of time thereafter, state police investigators confirmed that C.B. was at work that morning as he claimed, and, after a gunshot residue test of his hands was negative, he was quickly eliminated as a suspect. N.T. Adjudication Hearing, 4/11/12, at 63, 82, 138, 147.

One of the

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