If your elderly father was living with your brother and every time you asked to see him the brother said Dad was asleep and too tired or sick to have visitors, how long would you put up with that?
Two years? That’s how long the daughter of 81-year-old Leroy Adams waited before she reported her father missing in July 2008.
The brother, Lon Adams, 59, has pleaded innocent to second-degree murder. Prosecutors claim the Metairie Louisiana man put his fatally injured father to bed and never checked him again.
His skeleton was found curled in his bed.
After the sister reported her father missing in June 2008, Lon Adams told a newspaper his father died of natural causes.
"He died. I couldn't deal with it so I just left him there. I blocked it out of my mind. I was stressed out after Katrina. I just don't know," Adams said.
Investigators found that several ribs and a neck bone were broken around the time Adams died. They said he died of blunt-force trauma caused by “homicidal violence.”
The defendant says his father fell down stairs twice but seemed to be fine. He says he fell on his father’s neck when he was helping him into bed.
A next-door neighbor said that huge black flies covered the windows of the upstairs bedroom about a year before the skeleton was found.
Adams has said he last remembered seeing his father alive in the "second quarter of 2006."
Jury selection began today and more than 30 witnesses have been subpoenaed. A sanity evaluation declared Adams competent to stand trial.
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