John Browning was a successful lawyer. His wife, Tamara, was a PTA president. With their three sons, they were, in the words of one of the boys? teachers, “an all-American, wonderful family.”
That all changed Friday when police say the Brownings? oldest son, Nicholas, 15, murdered his father, mother and two younger brothers ? one by one ? while they slept.
“Oh my God. Not the whole family!” said distraught neighbor Lissel Petzold, 79, who has lived in the Brownings? secluded, upscale Cockeysville neighborhood for nearly 40 years. “It?s shocking. I have three sons of my own. How could someone do this?”
Nicholas Browning, a Dulaney High School sophomore whom classmates described as a lacrosse player with “a lot of friends,” confessed to the slayings, according to Baltimore County police spokesman Bill Toohey. Browning told police he had been in a fight with his father and used the man?s gun in the killings, Toohey said at a Sunday news conference.
Toohey said he did not know why the father and son were not getting along.
John Browning, 45, his 44-year-old wife, and sons Gregory, 13 and Benjamin, 11, were found dead in their Powers Avenue home Saturday around 5p.m. by Nicholas Browning as he returned home, police said.
He remains in custody at the Baltimore County Detention Center after a commissioner early Sunday denied him bail. He faces four counts of first-degree murder.
“It?s really depressing,” Michaela Cayle, a sixth-grader at Cockeysville Middle School, said Sunday. “We all just saw them at school.”
Active in church and the Boy Scouts, John Browning practiced law with the Towson firm Royston, Mueller, McLean & Reid.
An eighth-grader at Cockeysville Middle School, Gregory was the cougar mascot at the school?s sporting events. Friends described Benjamin, who was in sixth grade, as a “happy kid.”
Neighbors said the family liked to go on canoe trips. A lacrosse net sits in the backyard behind the family?s back deck, near the wooden playground and the grill used for family meals.
Now, on the Brownings? front porch sit flowers, stuffed animals and notes left by friends in mourning.
“My deepest sympathy to the Browning family,” Gregory?s friend, Kayla Campbell, wrote on one tribute. “You are always in my thoughts and prayers.”
Police said Nicholas shot the family Friday night, dumped the gun in bushes not far from his house and spent Friday night and all day Saturday with friends.
When driven back to his home Saturday at 5 p.m., he went in the house and came back out to tell his friends that his father was dead inside, police said.
The news shocked classmates, teachers and neighbors, who said Nicholas never exhibited any signs of sociopathic behavior or mental illness.
“He was like any other person. He was a normal kid,” said a former teacher, who wished not to be named. “But who knows what goes on behind closed doors?”
