A surveillance video found at the Little Falls home of Byron Smith shows teenagers Nick Brady and Haile Kifer outside Smith’s house on Thanksgiving Day before the homeowner shot them to death after they broke in.
A digital audio recorder found in the house also had been running and “contained audio of the shooting,” according to a search warrant filed in the murder case.
Smith, 64, faces two counts of second-degree murder in the deaths of Brady, 17, and Kifer, 18.
Morrison County Attorney Brian Middendorf and Sheriff Michel Wetzel declined to comment Monday on the recordings. Based on the search warrants, however, the findings seem to support pieces of the story that Smith, a retired U.S. State Department worker who set up security systems for embassies, told deputies a day after the killings, when they showed up at his house in response to a neighbor’s concern that he may have shot someone.
Smith told police that he shot the teenagers, who were cousins, multiple times after they broke into his house and walked down the stairs to his basement. He described “a good clean finishing shot” at Kifer, after she had been shot several times in the chest and dragged into an office workshop. He left the bodies there for a full day before deputies arrived.
He also said that his home, where he lived alone, had been burglarized several times before the Thanksgiving Day shooting.
Hamline University School of Law Prof. Joseph Olson said Monday that the videos, while significant, probably aren’t critical in building the case that Smith went beyond self defense in the killings.
“The first shot was completely authorized by Minnesota law,” Olson said. But if they have “given up the fight and are no longer a threat, you can’t shoot them again.”
