What made two Georgia brothers, 17 and 22, viciously attack their parents in a middle-class suburb of Atlanta is still a mystery. But an even more shocking detail has emerged from police – that the brothers planned the attack for years. Are the Ervin brothers the modern-day African-American version of the infamous Menendez brothers or was something going on at home that no one – friends, neighbors, their schools, knew anything about?
The AJC.com reports:
The night before they were attacked, Yvonne and Zachary Ervin got a call from one of their sons. He said he and his brother wanted to make the family dinner at their Snellville-area home.
“The mother said this was odd behavior,” according to a Gwinnett County police search warrant obtained Monday, “because the sons had not done this on prior occasions.”
What followed that night, police believe, were Xanax-spiked cocktails. What came the next morning was a brutal assault that left Yvonne Ervin badly beaten, Zachary Ervin stabbed multiple times, and both brothers — 17-year-old Cameron and 22-year-old Christopher — in the Gwinnett County jail.
In the days since the Sept. 5 attack, details about the brothers’ alleged actions have continued to trickle out, first through news releases and incident reports, then through Yvonne Ervin’s frantic 911 call. The search warrant released Monday provides even more insight into the alleged events on Forbes Trail.
Police previously had said that the brothers were “cooperative” during interviews with detectives, but the warrant goes further: It said both admitted to “attempting to set the residence on fire, [attempting to strangle] their parents with a pillow and/or plastic bag, and stabbing the father.”
It also said that “one of the sons … stated that he had been planning this since he was eleven years old.”
Yvonne Ervin was released from the hospital a few days after the attack. Zachary Ervin was released Thursday.
