SC teen pleads guilty to murder in death of father, boy

A 16-year-old pleaded guilty Wednesday to two charges of murder for fatally shooting his father in their home and a 6-year-old boy at a South Carolina elementary school.

Jesse Osborne faces 30 years to life in prison when he is sentenced at a later date. He also pleaded guilty to three counts of attempted murder in the shootings of two other students and a teacher, all of whom were wounded. During his confession, Osborne told investigators he had hoped to kill 20 or 30 students that day.

The teen, dressed in a sweater vest and a button-down shirt, said little in court beyond answering Circuit Judge Lawton McIntosh's questions on giving up his right to a trial and other legal matters with "yes, sir" and "no, sir."

Osborne had just turned 14 when he shot and killed his father in their home on Sept. 28, 2016, then drove his dad's pickup truck 3 miles (5 kilometers) to Townville Elementary School in Anderson County, authorities said.

Osborne crashed the truck into a playground fence and fired several shots at a group of students outside for recess. Six-year-old Jacob Hall was shot in the leg and died three days later from blood loss.

Jesse Osborne killed his father with three shots to his head as he sat in a chair in their home, according to his confession after his arrest.

Osborne spent days talking about the shooting with several other people in an Instagram chatroom, prosecutors said.

He considered shooting students at his middle school where he had been suspended earlier that fall for bringing a hatchet and machete.

"The middle school has tons of cops," he said in the chat group six days before shooting. "The elementary school doesn't."

Osborne said he loaded the wrong type of ammunition in the gun and it jammed after every shot at the school. Teachers outside with their first-graders said he never tried to make it inside the school as the children rushed inside.

Crime-scene photos from inside the school showed smears of icing where panicked children ran around. They were eating cupcakes baked by someone's grandmother for their birthday, according to testimony at a February hearing that determined Osborne would be tried as an adult.

Osborne entered his guilty plea Wednesday with no deal from prosecutors about his sentence. The U.S. Supreme Court allows a life sentence without parole for suspects who are juveniles when they kill someone only in the most heinous of cases.

Osborne told investigators he was angry at his father because he would get drunk and berate and try to fight him and his mother. He also said in his confession that he was bullied.

WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. intelligence officials have determined that Russian President Vladimir Putin likely didn’t order the death of imprisoned opposition leader Alexei Navalny in February, according to an official familiar with the determination.

While U.S. officials believe Putin was ultimately responsible for the death of Navalny, who endured brutal conditions during his confinement, the intelligence community has found “no smoking gun” that Putin was aware of the timing of Navalny's death — which came soon before the Russian president's reelection — or directly ordered it, according to the official.

The official spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive matter.

Soon after Navalny’s death, U.S. President Joe Biden said Putin was ultimately responsible but did not accuse the Russian president of directly ordering it.

At the time, Biden said the U.S. did not know exactly what had happened to Navalny but that “there is no doubt” that his death “was the consequence of something that Putin and his thugs did.”

Navalny, 47, Russia’s best-known opposition politician and Putin’s most persistent foe, died Feb. 16 in a remote penal colony above the Arctic Circle while serving a 19-year sentence on extremism charges that he rejected as politically motivated.

He had been behind bars since January 2021 after returning to Russia from Germany, where he had been recovering from nerve-agent poisoning that he blamed on the Kremlin.

Russian officials have said only that Navalny died of natural causes and have vehemently denied involvement both in the poisoning and in his death.

In March, a month after Navalny’s death, Putin won a landslide reelection for a fifth term, an outcome that was never in doubt.

The Wall Street Journal first reported about the U.S. intelligence determination.

FILE - Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny gestures while speaking during his interview to the Associated Press in Moscow, Russia on Dec. 18, 2017. U.S. intelligence officials have determined that Russian President Vladimir Putin likely didn't order the death of Navalny, the imprisoned opposition leader, in February of 2024. An official says the U.S. intelligence community has found "no smoking gun" that Putin was aware of the timing of Navalny's death or directly ordered it. (AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko, File)