Grandmother fatally shoots her grandson

Police in West Bloomfield, Michigan, are investigating the alleged shooting death 17-year-old Jonathan Hoffman by his grandmother. Photo via guidonz at SXC Photo

Police in West Bloomfield, Michigan, are investigating what caused 74-year-old grandmother to allegedly shoot her own grandson, Jonathan Hoffman, to death in the home they lived in together on Friday evening.

Neighbors heard gunshots and the police were alerted.  They arrived on the scene at 5:30 p.m. and the grandson, who suffered multiple gunshot wounds, was rushed to Botsford Hospital in Farmington Hills.  The boy, a 17-year-old student at Farmington Central High School, was pronounced dead at approximately 6 p.m.

West Bloomfield police Lt. Tim Diamond told the Detroit Free Press that the grandmother was taken into custody but was not immediately questioned. Instead, she was being guarded Friday night by two officers “at a local hospital, for observation because of her age and the circumstances.”

The boy’s parents had recently divorced and moved to Arizona, and the boy had moved in with his grandmother and grandfather, who was not present at the time of the shooting, so that he would not have to change schools, the Detroit Free Press reports.

Jerome Sabbota, the grandmother’s attorney, said Saturday in a report by the Detroit Free Press, that she fired the gun, a .40-caliber Glock semi-automatic, because she “didn’t have a choice — she was afraid.”

The boy’s father, Michael Hoffman, 56, a prominent Michigan divorce attorney who had recently retired to Scottsdale, Arizona, said there was nothing that his son could have said or done to justify being shot to death by his maternal grandmother, reports the Detroit Free Press.

“I’m not saying he was aggressive, but if he was, I don’t understand how being aggressive but unarmed would justify her using deadly force,” the boy’s father told the Detroit Free Press.

The grandmother’s attorney said, according to the Detroit Free Press, that the boy had been in trouble for drug use and he and the grandmother had been arguing.

The boy’s father told the Detroit Free Press he had no idea his son and grandmother had been arguing.

The grandmother “talked to my ex-wife daily… We were never led to believe that the level of dysfunction was rising to this point,” he told the Detroit Free Press.  “I don’t have the intimate details of his involvement with drugs. I just don’t see how that fact, if it is a fact, would have any justification for what happened,” he said.

According to a report by the Detroit Free Press, the boy’s school friends had no idea he was arguing or having trouble with his grandmother, and were shocked to hear that a friend they described as funny, smart, never violent and a giving person had been killed.

Currently, no charges have been filed against the grandmother.