Nicholas Browning, who was given two life sentences Friday after admitting to killing his parents and two brothers in their upscale Cockeysville home, committed the murders in a sinister attempt to win inheritance money, prosecutors said.
“Nicholas Waggoner Browning killed his family for the money,” Baltimore County Deputy State’s Attorney Leo Ryan said in court.
Ryan said Browning killed his two little brothers, Gregory, 14, and Benjamin, 11, because they were “co-heirs to the family estate,” saying Nick mentioned “insurance money” in interviews after the killing and said: “I have a large inheritance coming.”
Browning, 16, admitted to killing his father, John Browning, 45; mother, Tamara Browning, 44; and two brothers on Feb. 2 — shooting them one-by-one as they slept.
Ryan characterized the murders as a “long-standing” plot in which the teen secretly stole and kept the key to his dad’s gun safe under his bed, wore gloves during the killings and attempted to stage a burglary by moving the video game systems and tampering with his mother’s jewelry.
“He killed Greg and Ben because if there wasn’t one to dispute his story, it would go,” Ryan said.
Prosecutors played portions of Browning’s confession to Baltimore County police in court and even presented to Judge Thomas Bollinger a tape-recorded phone call from Browning to an unidentified girl two days before the sentencing. On that tape, Browning and the girl are heard laughing and flirting as he talks about being released from prison.
“You’re going to be out in 25 years or less,” the girl is heard saying.
Wearing glasses, Browning, a Dulaney High student, apologized to his extended family in court. He stood up, turned to face the packed courtroom behind him, and dabbed his eyes with a tissue, before saying: “I’m so sorry.”
His attorney, Joshua Treem, read a statement on Browning’s behalf in which he blamed a “toxic” home environment for leading up the killings, but admitted: “I was thinking only of myself.”
In arguing for a reduced sentence, Treem said Browning was provoked to kill by “a father who abused him and a mother who enabled him to do just that” — though the defense team never produced evidence of abuse beyond verbal insults and some physical punishment.
A psychiatrist hired by defense attorneys previously testified that Browning’s parents were verbally abusive and that the teen was in a “trance-like state” during the killings.
“This was a deeply disturbed young man in a deeply disturbed family in which a gun was available and a tragedy happened,” psychiatrist Neil Blumberg said, adding that Browning suffers from dissociative disorder and alcohol abuse.
Blumberg said Browning fantasized about killing his family in the moments before their deaths.
“He was in a trance-like state,” the psychiatrist said. “He started fantasizing, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if they weren’t here? Wouldn’t it be nice if they couldn’t bother me anymore?’ ”
But Judge Bollinger said he rejected outright any notion that Browning’s parents were abusive and that abuse led to their deaths.
Ryan categorized Browning’s defense as a “shameless display of self-centeredness” that “victimized his family again.”
Under state law, Browning will be eligible for parole in no less than 30 years.
