John Henry Spooner Guilty: Wisconsin Man Convicted Of Killing 13-Year-Old Black Boy

John Henry Spooner was found guilty on Wednesday of killing his 13-year-old neighbor after accusing the boy of stealing from him.

A jury deliberated only an hour before finding the 76-year-old Milwaukee man guilty of first-degree intentional homicide.

The case has drawn comparisons to the shooting death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. John Henry Spooner was white, while Darius Simmons was black.

Spooner shot the 13-year-old Simmons outside his home after accusing the boy of stealing $3,000 worth of guns from his home. The two got into an argument, as Darius denied stealing anything and Spooner raised his handgun.

The May 2012 killing was caught on surveillance video. The footage shows the two stop momentarily and look toward Darius’ porch, where the boy’s mother Patricia Larry was watching. Then John Henry Spooner again raised his gun firing a shot into the boy’s chest from five feet away.

“My son, Darius Simmons, was shot and killed in front of me,” Larry said. ‘It’s affected me, my friends, my work.”

Spooner and defense attorney Franklyn Gimbel had argued that the man did not intend to kill Darius. An expert also testified that Spooner suffered from a mental illness that impaired his judgment and ability to know right from wrong. The 76-year-old man will now have a second phase of his trial, one in which a jury will decide if he was mentally competent at the time of the killing.

The psychiatrist hired by the defense, Dr. Basil Jackson, testified that John Henry Spooner had powerful bouts of anger and aggression along with periodical disconnections from reality. Jackson noted that Spooner once killed a kitten his daughter brought home simply because he didn’t like it.

Jackson claims Spooner was in one of these fits of anger when he killed Simmons.

“There was an eruption, a loss of control. And at that moment he was not able – at that moment – to make a judgment,” Jackson said. “It’s like he was on autopilot.”

In the second phase of the trial, the defense has to prove “clear and convincing evidence” that John Henry Spooner was mentally impaired, a standard less strict than “beyond a reasonable doubt.”