The 16-year-old suspect accused of fatally stabbing a 13-year-old runaway 23 times bragged to a friend about the killing, a DeKalb County police detective testified Tuesday.
The witness said he saw suspect Troy Westberry walk into the woods with Marquis Overstreet behind his house in unincorporated Stone Mountain. Westberry emerged soon after, alone, with a large cut on his arm, according to the witness. He asked him what had happened to Overstreet.
"He's in the woods, bleeding," Westberry told his friend, according to Det. Bruce Brueggeman. "His eyes are wide open. I just killed him."
The witness came forward six days after seeing a television report about the July 4 slaying. Police took out a warrant on Westberry who, like Overstreet, attended DeKalb Alternative School.
Brueggeman said two knives and a gun were hidden inside a guitar case in the 16-year-old's room, along with a watch and bracelet belonging to Overstreet. Westberry's walls were festooned with pentagrams, the detective said, and a mummified squirrel or opossum was found under his bed.
Westberry told police he had offered to sell Overstreet some cigarettes in the woods off Biffle Downs Road. The 13-year-old pulled a gun on the suspect, who said he wrestled it away from Overstreet. The 23 stab wounds, mostly to the chest, were produced by a knife belonging to the victim, Westberry said. Overstreet also was shot two times.
"Our defense is self-defense," Westberry's attorney, Gina Bernard, said at Tuesday's probable cause hearing.
Brueggeman said ballistics tests aren't completed and Westberry's version can't be corroborated.
Overstreet's mother, Keisha Langhorne, attended the hearing.
"At first, I was nervous when I saw [Westberry]," she told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "But then I looked at him and I saw a lost kid."
"Preacher" Bennie Foster, who was in court Tuesday comforting the victim's family, said he also knew the suspect from an anger management class he taught at the alternative school.
"I don't see Marquis as the kind of kid who'd try to rob someone with a gun," Foster said.
Westberry was more troubled, he said, once writing a rap about having sex with dead bodies.
‘That's the way he talked," Foster told the AJC. "He kept alluding to murder, to Satanic stuff, to perversion."
The other kids in school didn't seem to take Westberry seriously.
"[Troy] always wanted attention," he said. "To know now that he did this ... I don't want to believe it, but I can."
Westberry was bound over to DeKalb Superior Court, where he'll be tried for murder. He is being tried as an adult; the AJC has a policy against identifying juvenile suspects unless they are charged as adults.
Updates to come.
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