John Jefferson
Background: Collin Griffith speaking to cops months before he allegedly killed his mom (WFTX/YouTube). Insets left to right: Collin Griffith and his mother Catherine Griffith, knife used to murder Catherine Griffith (Instagram/Polk County (Fla.) Sheriff’s Office).
A teen accused of stabbing his mom to death in Florida — two years after claiming to kill his dad in self-defense — can be heard talking to his grandmother in a newly-released bodycam video about how he told his mother, “I’m not a murderer,” less than a year before allegedly taking her life.
“I was saying, ‘Mom, I’m not a psychopath,”” Collin Griffith, 17, can be heard telling his grandmother in a bodycam video captured by a deputy with the Charlotte County Sheriff’s Office and released by local Fox affiliate WFTX on Tuesday.
“I’m not a murderer,” he recalled saying to his mother, Catherine Griffith, 39, during a fight they were having in November 2023, which prompted police to be called and led to him being arrested for domestic violence. “I’m just trying to peacefully leave or peacefully coexist. She kept telling me to shut up and shut up, and when I wouldn’t shut up, she hit me.”
Griffith, who is charged with first-degree murder, was in the back of a police car while speaking to his grandmother during the video. He can be heard telling a deputy that he’s “in a constant state of fight or flight” and worried that he may attack his mom.
“If I think she’s going to do something, even if she’s not, I might act,” Griffith says. “I’m not going to, like, go crazy or anything. But I’m not sure, honestly.”
The deputy goes on to ask, “You’re not sure if you’ll hurt your mom?”
Collin replies, “Only if she tries to hurt me.”
Griffith is behind bars in Polk County after allegedly killing his mother on Sept. 8, according to police officials. The slaying took place in a 55-and-over community in Auburndale, some 50 miles east of Tampa, where Griffith’s grandmother is a resident and where the bodycam footage was captured in November 2023.
Griffith allegedly called police after murdering his mom and told a dispatcher that they “had a very long fight and she fell on a knife.” Cops said they found Catherine Griffith stabbed multiple times in the neck. Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd said at a press conference in September that her injuries could not have been accidental.
“The medical examiner said it’s just not reasonable or plausible that she died the way that he said she did,” Judd said. “It just didn’t happen.”
In February 2023, Griffith allegedly killed his father in Oklahoma but avoided prosecution after successfully claiming self-defense. When Florida deputies encountered him after his mom’s murder he was allegedly acting “calm, cool, collected,” according to Judd, who said that Griffith showed “zero remorse.”
“He looked the deputy in the eye and said: ‘I know my rights,” Judd recalled Griffith saying. “‘I want an attorney.’”
Griffith’s grandmother can be heard telling police in the bodycam video from November 2023 that the teen didn’t want to live with his mother anymore before she was killed.
“Collin did not want to come back home,” she tells a deputy. “And I said, ‘You don’t have a choice, you have to go back home.’ And he said, ‘No, I want foster care,’ and even the corporal said that foster care isn’t good for you. You have issues you need to work on.”
Before police were called, Griffith allegedly pushed his mother to the ground and “stomped on her” after she took away his video game privileges, according to PCSO officials. Griffith claimed self-defense, but that argument failed, and he went to jail.
Two months before that incident, Griffin was involuntarily committed for mental health reasons after he allegedly made a threatening statement, claiming: “I’ll kill myself, or I’ll kill my mother by shooting or stabbing her,” according to police officials.
Polk County authorities have asked prosecutors to charge Griffith, who is being held without bond, as an adult.
Marisa Sarnoff contributed to this report.
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