ALAMOGORDO - Cody Posey says he felt overwhelmed and lost control of his emotions the day he shot and killed his family.
"I don't know what I was thinking. I couldn't tell you," the 16-year-old told jurors during his second day on the stand.
Posey is being tried on three counts of murder and tampering with evidence in the deaths of his father, Delbert Paul Posey, his stepmother, Tryone Posey, and his 13-year-old stepsister, Mary Lee Schmid, on July 5, 2004, on a southern New Mexico ranch owned by newsman Sam Donaldson. Paul Posey was Donaldson's ranch foreman.
"I myself wish I knew what I was thinking. I more or less lost my mind," Cody Posey testified Friday.
The teen told jurors on Thursday about abuse he said he suffered at the hands of his father and his stepmother. He gave more details Friday under questioning by his attorney, Gary Mitchell.
Posey described his father burning him with a metal rod used for welding after he refused to have sex with his stepmother the night before the slayings.
"I felt dirty. I felt disgusted," he said.
Mitchell cited that night as the culmination of abuse.
"He gets called into the bedroom," Mitchell said in his opening statement. "There lying in the bed is his stepmother, naked, and he's told that he's going to have sex with her."
The teen, who was 14 when the killings occurred, said he bit his stepmother during the incident and then ran and crouched in a corner of his room.
He described how he once was confined to his room for much of his sixth-grade school year for getting bad grades.
"Everything was taken away after that," Posey said.
His father gave him a mattress and a sheet but made him earn his bed frame, clothes and boots through work on the ranch, Posey testified.
Prosecutor Sandra Grisham has said the claims of abuse are "a fairy tale."
In cross examination Friday, she portrayed Posey as "a bad boy" who sometimes smoked marijuana, blatantly disobeyed his parents, took a knife to school and had a problem with lying.
Posey testified about numerous incidents of verbal and physical abuse: his father waking him with an electric cattle prod, being dragged behind a horse and being slapped for talking to certain people, including school friends.
Grisham asked Posey why he related more accounts of abuse to the jury than to doctors.
"You remember a lot more incidences than you told any of these doctors about," she said.
Posey didn't dispute that.
Posey also testified that he was punched, slapped and kicked so many times that he lost count. He often went to school with bruises and was told "to lie about it," he said.
"He (his father) said if I did turn him in, he would have to get out of jail sometime (and) would hunt me down," the teen said.
