YORK, Pa. (AP) - A Pennsylvania inmate is admitting he killed his brother when they were teens two decades ago, pleading guilty to third-degree murder so that he could be released from prison in about a year.
Zachary Paul Witman told a York County judge on Thursday that he stabbed to death his 13-year-old brother Gregory in the laundry room of their family home in New Freedom in 1998.
The 34-year-old inmate was a 15-year-old honor student when he stabbed his brother 65 times in the neck and nearly decapitated him.
He’d previously denied committing the crime.
A jury convicted him in 2003 of first-degree murder, resulting in an automatic life sentence.
He now says he snapped because his brother was angry at him for hanging up on his brother’s girlfriend.
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