CARROLLTON, Ga. — A family member of a couple killed in their Carroll County home said she suspected the couple’s teenage daughter was involved in their deaths.
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“Obviously, we were glad that someone was finally being held accountable for this, and we of course had our suspicions, so it wasn’t that shocking,” said Krysten Dowda, the couple’s niece.
Last week, Carroll County investigators charged 17-year-old Sarah Grace Patrick with shooting and killing her parents as they slept in their bed. It happened on Feb. 20 inside their home along Tyus Carrollton Road. The couple’s 5-year-old daughter discovered the bodies of Jamie and Kristin Brock, and investigators said Patrick called 911.
Dowda said she believed Patrick, who was 16 at the time, was responsible when the teen claimed she heard nothing unusual on the night of the shootings.
“The gunshots – how do you not hear the gunshots?” she said. “We know for sure there were at least four.”
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Patrick helped plan the couple’s funeral and spoke at the memorial service. However, Dowda said she was disturbed by what she considered a lack of emotion from the teen.
“It wasn’t a eulogy; she was giving a speech,” she said. “She never stopped to compose herself or to shed a tear.”
Dowda said investigators also saw Patrick’s lack of emotion as a “red flag.”
Patrick was 16 at the time of the murders but is being charged as an adult. Along with two counts of murder, she also faces two counts of aggravated assault.
Investigators have not identified a motive for the murders, and family members are struggling to understand what prompted the violence.
“I’m not going to speculate on that,” Dowda said. “But I think we’ve all been a teenager and been mad at our parents and didn’t like what they said or rules that they made, but what we didn’t do was kill our parents.”
She said she saw no warning signs in the days leading up to the shootings.
“Nothing that raised an alarm to me, just a typical teenage girl,” she said. “But Jamie had told us multiple times that Sarah was not who we thought she was. You don’t see what I see. You don’t live in the home with her.”
Jamie and Kristin Brock had married several years ago and had one child, a 5-year-old, together. In all, they had seven children between the two of them.
“They have all of these children that they leave behind that lost a mother and lost a father, the youngest one losing both,” Dowda said.
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The Carroll County Sheriff’s Office says it worked for months behind the scenes.
“We collaborated with agencies such as the FBI, the GBI crime lab, and private forensic laboratories,” said county spokesperson Ashley Husley after the arrest. “We feel confident that she is responsible for their murders.”
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