TUTTLE — Grady County law enforcement authorities knew John Smith Jr., as someone with a history of domestic violence fueled by methamphetamine use, Sheriff Art Kell said Monday.
Smith, 20, was killed Friday night by a single shot fired from a high-powered deer rifle by his father. The shooting is being treated as justifiable homicide, Kell said.
The parents, John and Rita Smith, told investigators that the younger man had come to their home east of Tuttle late Friday to ask for money. When they gave him cash, he became irate and tore the bills up. In what Kell described as methamphetamine rage, he strangled his mother and attacked his father, a dialysis patient, and grabbed a young girl his parents were baby-sitting, threatening to kill the child.
When the younger Smith went to the kitchen to get a butcher knife, his father got the rifle. As the son came down the hall toward the bedroom where the three were, the father stepped into the hall and fired the fatal shot.
