"Family violence ends in the death of a Brockton father" by Zachary T. Sampson | Globe correspondent June 24, 2014
BROCKTON — A family apparently fractured by years of domestic violence reached a fatal breaking point Monday night when a son stabbed his father near the heart, severing his aortic artery with a small kitchen knife, prosecutors said.
Amilton Goncalves, 21, is accused of killing his father outside the family home after a day of fighting among family members. About 3:30 Monday afternoon, authorities said, Goncalves punched his mother, Isabel, twice in the face. About six hours later, according to a police report, his father, Joao, was dead.
When officers caught up to Amilton Goncalves, he repeatedly asked if his father was OK, according to police. Told later that he was being charged with murder, the young man allegedly said, “That little knife killed my father? There’s no way. I can’t kill my father.”
The family argument began Sunday over the volume of music playing on Goncalves’s iPhone, prosecutors said Tuesday in Brockton District Court.
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Goncalves’s defense attorney countered that the conflict actually began years earlier, when his client was subjected to persistent “domestic turmoil” as a child. According to the attorney, Liam D. Scully, Goncalves was retreating from his punch-throwing father Monday night when he swung the blade of a paring knife in self-defense.
“There’s ongoing friction that rises and falls in intensity,” Scully said in an interview. “That day, it was rising.”
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