Despite a confession, police say they still have no motive for why Dulaney High School sophomore Nicholas Browning allegedly killed his parents and two brothers as they slept Friday night.
“We have no explanation for it,” Baltimore County police spokesman Bill Toohey said Tuesday. “We have not established a motive.”
While police say the teen had been arguing with his father, “he did not have a confrontation with his dad that night,” Toohey said.
“There was something boiling up inside this boy.”
Police may be confounded by the boy?s actions, but students who rode the school bus with Browning say the teen recently began talking about killing his parents, but none of them took him seriously.
“He talked about how rich his father was, how he wanted some of that money,” said one middle schooler, whose father asked The Examiner not to publish her name. “He didn?t like his father because he used to always yell at him and stuff. He called his mom a ditzy, dumb blonde. We thought he was kidding.”
The students said Nicholas Browning used to pick on his younger brothers on the bus ? and would punch Gregory, 14, when he wouldn?t listen.
“We thought he was weird,” the girl said of Browning. “He was really mean.”
But students like Shana Cayle, 17, a junior at Dulaney, say Browning appeared completely normal at school.
His father, John Browning, 45, along with mother, Tamara, 44, and brothers Gregory and Benjamin, 11, were found dead in their Powers Avenue home Saturday around 5 p.m. by Nicholas Browning as he returned home, police said.
Police said Nicholas dumped the gun in nearby bushes and spent Friday night and all day Saturday with friends, before contacting police later that day after returning home.
Browning?s former attorney, Steve Silverman, told a Baltimore County judge Monday that the teen is “traumatized” by the death of his family and might have falsely confessed to the killing.
Browning, an “honors student,” was close to becoming an Eagle Scout and also plays the cello, Silverman said.
Baltimore County appointed Cynthia and Mark Warnecki, of Sterling, Va., as the teen?s guardians Monday. Although the county said the guardians hired an attorney for Browning, no lawyer entered an appearance in the case Tuesday. Cynthia Warnecki, reached at her home Tuesday evening, declined to comment.
Called an “all-American family” by neighbors, John Browning practiced law with the Towson firm Royston, Mueller, McLean & Reid, and Tamara Browning was a PTA president.
“John was a wonderful man,” his fellow lawyers at the firm wrote in a statement. “He and his wife, Tammy, were very much in love. Together they were caring and loving parents to their children.”
