Daughter confronts her father’s killer
Convict defiant at parole hearing
Erin Mortell was 11 years old when her father was ruthlessly killed by three men on a house-robbing spree more than two decades ago.
Yesterday, one of those men, Jamie Richards, appeared before the parole board for the first time since he pleaded guilty to second-degree murder for his role in the Feb. 1, 1994, slaying of Paxton police Chief Robert “Bobby” Mortell.
Richards showed no remorse, shed no tears and offered no apology to the slain chief’s family. He was defensive and angry, and never even asked the board to parole him.
Erin Mortell lashed out at Richards for his cold-hearted apathy.
“He’s coming in here like it’s a field trip away from jail,” she said. “He’s the same person he was 22 years ago and has done nothing to work on himself. He’s just sitting here shrugging his shoulders, doesn’t care what he’s done to my family. I want him to hear what my memory was of that day.”
Mortell took a deep breath and recalled, through tears, the day her beloved father was killed. Robert Mortell was 38 years old with a wife and three children.
That morning, she gave her father a hug and went to school.
It was a normal day until she and her brother and sister were rushed home. She saw her mother jump into a police cruiser before she and her siblings were taken to a neighbor’s house.
Later, her aunt drove them home, where a throng of police officers and reporters packed their driveway. All she knew, Erin Mortell said, was that “my Dad got hurt.”
The chief’s children were brought into a bedroom, where they were told their father had been fatally shot.
“It took a long time for it to hit that he’s just not coming through that door,” Erin Mortell recalled. “You’re still waiting for him to come through the door.”
As she was told her father was never coming home, she said, Richards was hiding in a pool house with accomplice Kenneth Padgett “worrying about how he’s still going to get away.”
Padgett was convicted of second-degree murder and has been denied parole. Michael Souza was convicted of shooting Mortell with a 9 mm semi-automatic and is behind bars for life with no chance of parole.
“And I please beg you,” Erin Mortell said. “He needs to sit in jail and that’s where he belongs.”
Richards was a 22-year-old man with a lengthy criminal record at the time of the chief’s murder. His life of crime started when he was just 12 years old, he carried around a loaded gun and he had 55 adult criminal convictions.
In prison, he racked up 30 disciplinary reports, including the violent assault of a fellow inmate. None of his relatives was at the hearing and he offered up no plan for life after prison should he be released.
“It just made it even tougher on the family. He came in here defiant, argumentative, taking no ownership over anything,” Worcester District Attorney Joseph D. Early Jr. said after the hearing. “This will be the last guy in the world that ever should be paroled.”