Lawyers representing an Ohio father who allegedly confessed to killing his three young sons execution-style are trying to suppress his “entire interrogation,” claiming cops violated his constitutional rights “from the outset.”
Chad Doerman, 32, was arrested and charged with three counts of aggravated murder on June 15, when Clermont County sheriff’s deputies found him sitting on the steps of his front porch in Monroe Township with a rifle at his side — and his three sons, ages 3, 4 and 7, dead from gunshot wounds in the backyard.
He was still handcuffed when deputies began to interrogate him, defense attorneys claim in a new court filing, which asserts that two senior detectives “joined forces to exploit Mr. Doerman’s ignorance of the law, obvious confusion and mental issues to extract constitutionally tainted statements from him.”
It claims that detectives read Doerman his rights and asked him if he understood them.
“Doerman responds ‘yep’ and nods affirmatively,” reads the court filing, obtained by The Post.
“Mr. Doerman is never presented with a written copy of his rights,” it continues. “The detective never asks Mr. Doerman if he wants to waive those rights; he never asks Mr. Doerman to sign a waiver of those rights; he never obtains a constitutionally valid waiver of those rights.”
About five minutes later, Doerman allegedly asked for an attorney.
“I’ll wait for a lawyer, I really don’t know,” he said in response to one of the detective’s questions, according to an interrogation video referenced in the court filing.
“Give me a couple of days and let me talk to a lawyer so I can get nice, clean answers.”
But the court filing alleges that the detectives ignored the request, and continued questioning him without legal counsel for three hours.
“The burden was not on Mr. Doerman to understand how his demands for counsel triggered the detectives’ duty to stop the interrogation; nor was the burden on Mr. Doerman to resist the detectives’ attempts to keep him talking,” the court filing states.
It also accuses sheriff’s deputies of threatening him and even calling him a “monster.”
The defense attorneys are also trying to suppress any conversations or statements Doerman made to medical professionals while officers were present.
They claim that when Doerman met with a mental health liaison at Clermont County Jail, deputies “actively made themselves present by entering Mr. Doerman’s jail cell with his health care providers for some of these privileged communications and recorded them” on officer-worn body cameras.
But Doerman’s mental state at the time “was such that he could not make a knowing, intelligent or voluntary consent to police being present had he been asked.
“He was in no condition to object to their presence,” the filing says.
As he was being questioned about his sons’ deaths, Doerman allegedly confessed to lining up his three young sons and executing them with a rifle at their home — as his terrified daughter, Alexis, fled, screaming that he was “killing everyone.”
Doerman also allegedly confessed that he had been planning the executions for eight months, according to WLWT.
But Doerman’s father, Keith, previously told The Post that his son “just snapped.”
“There was something going on in his life that he couldn’t handle no more,” he said.
The father also insisted that his son had no history of mental illness or strange behavior or a criminal record.
Doerman is being held on a $20 million bond.
A hearing to consider the motion to dismiss his interrogation is scheduled for Feb. 2, and a trial in his case is expected to begin in July.