Bodycam video shows warning signs from teen accused of killing mother

In newly released body camera footage, a mother questions her son’s violence months before her murder.

Seventeen-year-old Collin Griffith is facing first-degree murder charges for stabbing and killing his mother with a knife in Polk County last September.

The body cam video was recorded months earlier when he was put under a Baker Act in Charlotte County.

Prior to this case, the teen faced first-degree murder charges in Oklahoma for shooting and killing his father.

Those charges were dropped because he claimed he acted in self-defense.

• RELATED: Port Charlotte teen charged with murder has violent past
• RELATED: 17-year-old accused of murder to be tried as an adult

Griffith could spend the rest of his life behind bars for killing his mother.

“When you look at this, you see a kid,” said Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd. “When I look at this I see a psychopath.”

The Charlotte County Sheriff’s Office released bodycam footage showing incidents leading up to Catherine Griffith’s tragic death.

“She thinks that I’m going to kill her, that I want to kill her, that I want to beat the [expletive] out of her,” Griffith can be heard saying in body camera footage.

When asked by an officer if this was true, Griffith replied, “No, sir.”

That video, filmed just a little under a year before Catherine was killed, may have been the warning signs that needed closer attention.

The officer asks Griffith if he would be able to control himself.

“I am in a constant state of fight or flight and I don’t know, if I think she’s going to do something, even if she’s not, I might act,” said Griffith.

Collin’s grandmother also told deputies there was a history of confrontation between him and his mother, leading to him saying he didn’t even want to live with her.

“He said ‘I want foster care’, and even the corporal was saying foster care isn’t going to be good for you, you have issues you need to work through,” said his grandmother.

On Sept. 8 of last year, Griffith called 911, claiming that during an argument with his mother, she lunged at him with a knife and fell on it, resulting in a stab wound to her neck.

However, medical examiners concluded her injuries were not by accident, and that he had a history of this behavior.

“He stood up and said ‘Let’s do this [expletive].’ And literally in front of my own mother like attacked me,” said Catherine Griffith in the video. “He literally threw me to the ground, kicked me, stomped on my hand, broke part of my phone case, ’cause I was tryna record.”

Collin is charged with first-degree murder, kidnapping, and a violation of a no-contact order.

His mother’s death was just a little over a year after Collin’s father’s death, which he admitted to shooting in a heated argument however, investigators say he did that in self-defense.

However, the district attorney’s office there says it would consider re-evaluating the case if any new evidence is uncovered in the death of his father.