A Villages couple’s 50-year-old son has been sentenced after threatening his parents with an “ISIS Style” attack last year at their home in the Village of Largo.
Jayson Scott Kearney, of The Villages, was arrested June 30, 2017 on felony charges of aggravated battery and assault by Sumter County sheriff’s deputies.
Last week in Sumter County Court, Kearney pleaded no contest in the case and was placed on probation for three years.
Kearney’s 70-year-old mother said she had been sitting in a chair watching television at her home on Pendleton Circle when Kearney approached her from the rear and put his arm around her neck while holding a knife. He simulated slicing her neck. Her son told her, “This is how I’m going to kill you!”
Kearney graphically described giving his mother and his 75-year-old father “smiley faces,” according to the arrest report. The smiley faces were in reference to slitting their throats from ear to ear.
Kearney, who is 6 feet, 3 inches tall and weighs 250 pounds, boasted how easy it would be to do it and then steal their vehicle and travel “back to South Carolina.” Kearney had previously been arrested in South Carolina on a drug charge.
The woman told deputies he kept waving the knife around and when she tried to calm him down, he stabbed her arm three times. The puncture wounds began to bleed. She said Kearney then said, “This is what will happen if you even try and call the police.”
Kearney then used the knife to stab at the drywall in the home. He also made large gouges in the television and cut at his mother’s plants.
He tossed his knife in the yard prior to the arrival of deputies.
The couple described their fear as “beyond terror.”
