Schoolboy murder suspect 'planned to kill others'

A 14-year-old boy charged with murdering a classmate in a school toilet had planned to kill him, another schoolmate and any witnesses, according to excerpts from his diary.

Michael Hernandez’s three-name “hit list” also included his college-age sister.

A judge in Miami, Florida, released two edited pages of the eighth-grader’s personal journal despite defence objections a week after 41 pages were issued.

A page entitled “planning” indicated Hernandez wanted to stab his two schoolmates a day before the February 3 killing of Jaime Rodrigo Gough. Gough was found bleeding to death from stab wounds to the neck in a toilet at Southwood Middle School.

“Make sure they are dead Make sure there is no one in the bathroom If So Kill Them,” one diary entry read. The final entry began: “Thank God for success first.”

The other classmate targeted was identified only as A.M. in the edited journal entries.

On previously released journal pages, the words “will become a serial killer” were handwritten at the bottom of an Internet printout on mass killers.

A hearing in the case was held yesterday. Hernandez, who was a gifted student at a magnet school in the affluent Miami suburb of Palmetto Bay, smiled occasionally in court as he talked with his lawyer Richard Rosenbaum and a defence psychologist.

Hernandez’s parents attended the hearing and left holding hands.

“We love our son very much. We stand by him,” Kathy Hernandez said. She added that she was “overwhelmed with grief” for Gough’s family.

Asked to describe his reaction to the evidence against his son, Hernandez’s father, Jesus, said, “He isn’t like that.”

Circuit Judge Henry Leyte-Vidal asked the prosecution and defence to recommend two psychologists to evaluate Hernandez.

As a juvenile charged as an adult, Hernandez could be sentenced to life in prison if convicted of first-degree murder. A lesser sentence is possible if the judge, lawyers on both sides and both families agree on reduced charges.

Rosenbaum has not said whether he would pursue an insanity defence.