‘I just snapped,’ killer says

SOMERS, Conn. —A man convicted in the brutal home invasion killings of a Connecticut woman and her two daughters in 2007 said no one was supposed to get hurt and he “just snapped” before he and an accomplice set fire to the house.

“To this day I don’t know why it happened, I just wanted money. That’s all I was looking for,” Steven Hayes said in an hour-long jailhouse interview with the New Haven Register, which published his comments in Sunday’s editions.

Hayes, 50, and Joshua Komisarjevsky, 33, were convicted of capital felony, murder, sexual assault and other crimes and sentenced to death for the July 2007 killings of Jennifer Hawke-Petit and her daughters, Hayley, 17, and Michaela, 11, at their home in suburban Cheshire.

The two men, both convicted burglars, spotted Hawke- Petit and Michaela at a local grocery store, followed them and later broke into their home. Komisarjevsky beat Dr. William Petit, the only survivor, with a baseball bat, and Hayes later went with Hawke- Petit to a bank and forced her to withdraw $ 15,000 under the threat of harming her family.

Authorities said Hayley and Michaela were tied to their beds. Komisarjevsky sexually assaulted Michaela, and Hayes strangled and sexually assaulted Hawke-Petit. The two girls died from smoke inhalation after Komisarjevsky and Hayes set the house on fire and fled before crashing into police cruisers and being arrested.

Hayes said he and Komisarjevsky were going to leave after he returned from the bank with Hawke-Petit. But then, he said, Komisarjevsky told him that he sexually assaulted Michaela.

Both Hayes and Komisarjevsky have blamed each other for escalating the crime.