A DeBary teen called 911 to report mother missing

But Volusia County detectives now say he killed, buried her

A 15-year-old in DeBary called 911 Friday afternoon with a worrisome report: He said he came home from school to find his house ransacked, the car running outside, and his mother nowhere to be found.

But Volusia County deputies soon figured out that the boy had gotten into a fight with his mother over a bad grade, strangled her to death, then enlisted two friends to help bury her body and stage a robbery, Sheriff Mike Chitwood said.

“I don’t know what to say, it’s just heartbreaking,” Chitwood said. “And to watch how cold and callous and calculating he was I think was probably the most shocking thing to all of us.”

Gregory Logan Ramos, of 35 Alicante Road in DeBary, was arrested on a murder charge in the death of his mother, Gail Cleavenger, 46.

“She was a mom, she was a wife, she was a sister. By all accounts, she was an amazing human being,” Chitwood said.

Gregory’s two friends, both 17, are facing charges of being accessories to a crime after the fact.

Gregory is interested in crime and in law enforcement, Chitwood said. He is a member of the Orange City Police Explorers and took criminal justice classes at University High School in Orange City, where he learned about crime scenes. He told the detective questioning him, Sgt. A.J. Pagliari, that he, too, wanted to be a homicide detective one day.

Gregory came home from an Orange City Police Explorers outing Thursday night and got into an argument with his mother, who asked why he had gotten a D in school, Chitwood said.

Cleavenger’s husband, Gregory’s stepfather, was out of town, and it was just Gregory and his mother. He went to his room until midnight, then went into his mother’s room and strangled her with

his hands, Chitwood said.

“By his estimate, it took him 30 minutes to kill her,” Chitwood said. “...He was not — no sign of remorse whatsoever. He was a soulless individual who thought he was the smartest person in the room.”

Gregory used a wheelbarrow to get his mother’s body to the family’s car, then drove toward Holly Hill, Chitwood said. There he got rid of the wheelbarrow and decided to drive back home to pick up a shovel and a flashlight, and asked two of his friends to help him, Chitwood said.

Together they went to a fire pit near River City Church in the 200 block of E. Highbanks Road where they sometimes hung out and buried Cleavenger under it, Chitwood said. They also staged a burglary, taking an X-Box, a printer, a firearm, and a few other things from Gregory’s home and leaving them in the woods around the fire pit, Chitwood said.

“Then they all go to a Circle K in the area and have a celebratory soda,” Chitwood said. “... And then the next morning, our suspect gets up and goes to school.”

Gregory left school early Friday, about 1 p.m., and called 911 just before 4 p.m., Chitwood said

Sgt. A.J. Pagliari said he questioned Gregory for hours. Gregory denied knowing what happened to his mother, but once his friend confessed to helping him, Gregory decided to come clean too, Pagliari said.

“He that that it was a preemptive self-defense thing, because he thought that at some point she was going to kill him in his life, so `I might as well just kill her now,’” Pagliari said. “He says that she had been abusive toward him in the past, and I believe that’s kind of what justified, in his mind, why he did what he did.”