“Mom fuckin’ shot dad with a shotgun!” fifteen-year-old Gabriel Polk shouted into the receiver. His older brother, Adam, was on the other end of the phone line. “Yeah, fucking crazy bitch! We still have an apartment house. We still have an apartment. We get income. We are [inaudible]. We can keep it, I think. Dad left us a pile of [inaudible]. That’s for sure.”
Gabriel had been up all night, speaking with police after finding his seventy-year-old father dead, bathed in blood on the floor of the family’s pool house, about 50 feet from their home in Orinda, California. It was 10:15 AM on October 15, 2002, and the teen had just completed a lengthy interview with detectives from the Contra Costa Sheriff’s Office when he was told that Adam was on the phone.
“Yeah. Fuckin’ crazy bitch! I stumbled in on dad,” he explained. “No, no. She just shot him in the fuckin’ chest. Fucking crazy bitch. I had to call 911 and shit. They have like our whole house under police inspection or something.
“What the hell is wrong with her? I hope they give her the fucking death penalty…[inaudible].”
The sound of footsteps prompted the boy to end his conversation abruptly.
Peering into the cramped interrogation room, an investigator asked, “Are you still on the phone?”
“No,” Gabriel shot back. He was naked from the waist up. He had been so upset at the sight of his dead father in the pool house that he had left the residence barefoot, wearing only a pair of shorts. His usually bright brown eyes were bloodshot and framed by dark circles.
“Did the trauma guy say what we are going to do?” the officer asked.
“Just bring a sleeping bag,” Gabriel shrugged.
“Yeah, for right now…. We are going to have to get you a sleeping bag and a pillow. And we will resolve this as soon as we can.”
“I would like to know what is going to happen to us financially,” Gabriel said.
“Financially?” the officer repeated. “What do you mean?” It seemed an odd question coming from a boy who’d just discovered his father murdered—particularly when the boy’s own mother was the prime suspect.
Gabriel then brought up an apartment complex the family owned in San Francisco’s East Bay. “I don’t know what is going to happen right now, but I would like to hold onto that because we need a source of income.”
Twelve hours earlier, it had been a very different Gabriel that police encountered at the family’s sprawling hillside compound on Miner Road. Then, he was a nervous wreck, out in the street with a phone and a flashlight, afraid that his own mother might come after him.
As the sheriff’s officers arrived at the scene, he was unable to answer many of the officers’ questions. All he knew was that his father, Frank Felix Polk, was dead, and he was certain his mother had killed him.