A 16-year-old Florida girl shouted, “Welcome home!” to her single mother and much younger boyfriend before killing them in a horrific rampage, according to police and court records. When Kelley McCollom, 41, and Matthew Szejnrok, 22, arrived at their Palm Bay home on the evening of July 6, they were allegedly greeted at the door with a spray of bullets from McCollom’s daughter. The teen concocted a story about an intruder to a 911 operator, which quickly unraveled after she accidentally let slip that there was blood in the house. According to a probable cause affidavit, the daughter had reached a “boiling point” about the age difference between her mom and her mom’s boyfriend.
On late Saturday night, July 6, the teen grabbed a silver .38-caliber handgun from her mom’s bedroom and put the gun and a knife in her pockets, waiting for the couple to come home, according to court records obtained by Florida Today. As soon as they entered the house, the girl allegedly ambushed them, shooting them both multiple times. Her mom’s injuries were fatal, but Szejnrock was still alive and pleading for his life.
In her confession, she told police that an injured Szejnrock fled to the bathroom, but she followed him there and began stabbing him repeatedly with a chef’s knife because she had run out of ammunition. At this point, he asked her to “take him out of his misery.” The girl — unidentified due to her young age — went to her mother’s bedroom to load one last bullet into the gun and then fatally shot him in the head, execution style.
Despite security cameras at the house and blood everywhere, the teen is accused of concocting a half-baked cover-up story. She called 911 just after midnight to report a robbery. “Help me” were her first words in the call recently released by the Palm Bay Police Department and obtained by Inside Edition Digital. In a fake plea for help, she told the dispatcher that a burglar had entered her home, and she had retreated to her bedroom to hide out with her pit bull and chihuahua.
“I hid in my room for a really long time,” she told the 911 operator, who stayed on the phone with her for seven minutes. Crying hysterically and short of breath, she had difficulty recalling any details about the so-called intruder other than he was “normal height,” according to Inside Edition. She said the man used a “house hammer” found in the backyard to smash a window and break in.
“I brought the only thing I was able to grab in time, the dogs, ’cause I wanted them with me ’cause I didn’t want whoever it was to kill them, obviously, so I grabbed the dogs,'” she said, adding that the adults in the house — her mom and her mom’s boyfriend — were out shopping for bed frames.
After some silence, the teen said, “I think they’re gone.” As the 911 operator attempted to console her, the teen made flubbed her story by mentioning blood all over the house, saying she wouldn’t let the dogs leave the bedroom because she “didn’t want them getting blood all over their paws.” It was the first mention of any blood, and when the 911 operator questioned her about it, she simply said, “They’re dead.”
When authorities arrived, the teen stuck to her story at first, saying that she found the couple dead when she left her bedroom, reported ABC affiliate WFTV. She later admitted to staging the crime scene as a burglary when she confessed to murder, said the police, who found Szejnrok’s lifeless body on the bathroom floor. It’s unclear where McCollom was found and if the teen attempted to hide her mother’s body.
A bloody knife lay on the bathroom counter, and the gun was discovered outside the teen’s window. Bloody footprints had been tracked throughout the house, and they matched the shoes belonging to the teenager. Security camera footage revealed no evidence of a break-in.
Tension had been simmering in the family over a few issues. The teen “was not happy with the fact that Kelley was not very accepting of her transition, and she also did not like that [Kelley] was dating Matthew who was 22 years old,” stated documents obtained by WFTV.
The high-schooler was charged with two counts of first-degree premeditated murder, according to police, and the Brevard County State Attorney’s Office has not indicated yet if she will be tried as a minor instead of as an adult.
