We're sure to get more details in the coming weeks surrounding the horrific and sad deaths of Robert Kamin and Susan Poff of Oakland, whose adopted son Moses Kamin, 15, confessed to killing them on Friday. But the younger Kamin, who will be tried as an adult in the double-murder, was arraigned Tuesday in an Alameda County court in front of some of Poff's family members who traveled up from L.A. in order to make funeral arrangements. Further details have emerged about his motives, which he himself was vague about, and the initial incident the strangling of Poff on Thursday afternoon appears to have been prompted by an argument over Kamin's having been suspended from school on January 25. Kamin had earlier run away from home in November and lived among the Occupy Oakland campers in Frank Ogawa Plaza and at Snow Park.
The teenager weighs 200 pounds, as the Tribune reports, had a black belt in karate, and "outweighed each of his parents by about 50 pounds." They had adopted him at age five in 2002.
Poff worked at the S.F. Housing and Urban Health Clinic, and Robert Kamin was a psychologist at the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic, and worked in the S.F. jail. Poff's brother, speaking to reporters Tuesday about his sister and brother-in-law, said, "They impacted people around them every day with simple and unconditional love. It was what led them to their jobs, it is what led them to adopt a child no one else wanted..."
Furthermore, the Tribune narrates what investigators believe happened:
Shortly after the sun set Thursday, the 15-year-old was at home alone with his mother, Susan Poff, a 50-year-old woman who worked with poor people as a physician's assistant in a city-run clinic in San Francisco's Tenderloin district.Nobody but the teen knows what happened in the house by Lake Merritt that night. But the boy and his mother fought, likely about his recent suspension from school, and police say he used his bare hands to strangle her.
Police said he hauled her 150-pound body into a darkened room while he waited for his father, Robert Kamin, a 55-year-old physiologist in the San Francisco jails, to return home. When Robert Kamin got home about 7 p.m., the boy attacked him from behind and strangled him to death, police said.
The teen then waited until the early hours of Friday morning, between 3 and 6, to haul the bodies, one by one, out of the house in the 200 block of Athol Avenue and into the family's red Chrysler PT Cruiser, police said. He covered their bodies with blankets, police said, and several hours later tried, unsuccessfully, to set the car's gas tank on fire.
Kamin had only tried to set the car on fire after police came to the house Friday afternoon, prompted by one of his father's coworkers. Police asked Kamin about his parents' whereabouts, and then left. It was only after they returned that they noticed scorch marks on the car, and saw a foot sticking out from one of the blankets in the back of the car.
He has been assigned a public defender, and a plea won't be entered for two weeks.
Below, ABC 7's coverage:
[Tribune]