A 28-year-old Bethesda, Maryland man has been charged with second-degree murder after allegedly beating his father to death with a pair of baseball bats.
The suspect, Christian Arndt, appeared Friday in D.C. Superior Court after the incident occurred Thursday morning in the 3300 block of Newark Street NW, Washington D.C., The Washington Post reported. When cops arrived at the crime scene, they had discovered Arndt’s 54-year-old father, Donald Arndt, suffering from blunt trauma injuries. (REPORT: Police: Mom Catches Son Robbing Home. He Slits Her Throat, Beats Her To Death With A Bat)
Bethesda attorney charged with fatally beating father with baseball bats in D.C. home https://t.co/ZWBToku08W
— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) January 30, 2021
Arndt had already told police that he had beaten his sleeping father with two metal bats, according to WTOP News.
According to court documents, Arndt had been suffering from substance abuse, with police even finding Vodka bottles in his bedroom, reported The Washington Post.
Sebastian M. Norton, Arndt’s attorney, said Friday at the court hearing that according to Arndt’s mother, he had been hospitalized the day before the attack and was given the anxiety-relieving sedative Ativan, which she believes had an adverse effect, according to The Washington Post.
Police said that Arndt and his mother had described his father as verbally and physically abusive, which court documents suggest has been going on for years, WTOP News reported.
Arndt said that things had gotten stressful lately for him before the attack, having recently been fired from his job at a Bethesda law firm. He and his dad “had been getting on one another’s cases a lot” over the past few weeks, with his father calling him a “loser,” according to WTOP News.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Natalie Hynum described the attack as a “vicious murder,” pointing out that Arndt struck his father more than 10 times, using two distinct metal baseball bats, The Washington Post reported. Hynum described that at one point, Arndt’s mother and another person in the house pulled Arndt off his father. That was when Arndt grabbed the second baseball bat and returned to continued bludgeoning his father, according to the attorney.
“This shows premeditation,” Hynum said, according to The Washington Post. “He was walking back and forth, trying to muster up the strength to do the conduct at issue. And then he stopped hitting him when he believed he was dead.”