A former captain with California’s wildfire management agency has pleaded guilty to gunning down his girlfriend her second grader son last year.
Darin McFarlin may have entered the guilty plea to avoid the death penalty, as prosecutors had initially said he faces death or life without parole because of special circumstances, KCRA reported.
Those special circumstances were added because McFarlin killed 29-year-old Marissa Herzog and Josiah Divodi-Lessa because they were witnesses to a crime, as CrimeOnline reported. Details about that crime have not been released, although the boy’s death may have been because he witnessed his mother’s murder.
McFarlin also attempted to kill Herzog’s daughter in the home but was unsuccessful.
Prosecutors say that McFarlin attacked Herzog on August 21 inside a “bedroom before she left the room and used her cellphone and before he obtained the gun and went out to the dining room to kill her.” The document says that her murder was “willful, deliberate and premeditated.”
Herzog was found dead at the scene. The boy died at a hospital.
He was fired after his arrest, the Sacramento Bee reported.
According to Law&Crime, McFarlin pleaded guilty to two counts of first-degree urder with special circumstances, attempted murder, child abuse, intentional discharge of a firearm causing great bodily injury, and corporal injury to a cohabitant.
His sentencing is scheduled for April 13, KCRA said.
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[Featured image: Darin McFarlin/El Dorado County Sheriff’s Office]
