‘I am still his mother and he is still my son’
Posted 1 day, 13 hours ago at 10:02 am.
Editor’s note: Mary Apfel, mother of Dakotah Eliason, spoke to the Star Tuesday prior to the release of court documents to the media regarding the arrest of her son, documents she hadn’t even seen herself. Apfel had no comment to make about the information contained in those documents at press time.
When Dakotah Eliason, 14, appeared on a television screen broadcast inside a courtroom at the Berrien County South County Courthouse on Monday afternoon, Mary Apfel was a mother in visible agony.
Apfel had not seen her son since before he was taken into custody by Michigan State Police early Sunday morning for allegedly shooting his grandfather, Jesse Miles, who later died.
Eliason was booked and taken to the Berrien County Juvenile Center in St. Joseph, where he remains, charged as an adult with open murder.
In the hours following the incident at Miles’ home on Niles-Buchanan Road in Niles Township, speculation and rumors ran rampant regarding what would lead the 14-year-old boy to commit such an act.
Now his mother is speaking out with the hope the community will not rush to judge her son – though she says some already have.
“We don’t know why he did it,” Apfel said Tuesday. “There is no motive, there’s no motive. He loves his grandparents.”
In fact, Apfel said the Miles’ home was always open to her son and to her even after she and Eliason’s father Steven separated (the two were together for two years but never married).
It was inside that home at approximately 3 a.m. Sunday that tragedy would strike the Apfel-Eliason family in more ways than one.
http://www.nilesstar.com/2010/03/10/i-am-still-his-mother-and-he-is-still-my-son/