Columbus teen was 14 when he shot, stabbed his father’s girlfriend. Now he’s pleading

Hagan Everett Fredette was 14 years old when he repeatedly shot and stabbed his father’s girlfriend, leaving the 37-year-old mother of two sitting dead in a lawn chair in her carport.

Now 17, Fredette was set to be tried for murder when he accepted a plea deal Friday.

He pleaded “guilty but mentally ill” as Judge Arthur Smith III sentenced him to life in prison with possible parole, meaning he’ll serve at least 30 years before he eligible for release.

Before the sentencing, Emily McDaniel’s family tried to explain how her murder on Sept. 19, 2020, had affected them, and what they thought of her killer.

“He is evil and soulless and does not care about anything he did to anyone,” said Suzie Talley, McDaniel’s mother. “He has no remorse or feelings.

“I believe if he ever gets out, he’ll kill again,” Talley said.

Said Skipper McDaniel, the victim’s ex-husband and father of her two boys: “I hope when he gets where he’s going, he’s haunted for the rest of his life.”

In the deal negotiated by prosecutor Victoria Novak and defense attorney Anthony Johnson, Fredette pleaded guilty to malice or intentional murder. Other charges he faced were dropped.

Johnson told Smith that Fredette has five mental health issues, including post-traumatic stress disorder. His mother died from an overdose when he was five or six years old, and he and his father both have had substance abuse issues since, Johnson said.

Noting his client was 14 at the time of the crime, Johnson said Fredette lacked the maturity to deal with his mental illness.

“I struggle to call him ‘Mr. Fredette,’” the attorney said. “His actions are what made him in the eyes of the law an adult.”

Judge Smith noted that an evaluation showed Fredette had “serious psychological issues,” but it also concluded that he knew right from wrong at the time of the crime.

“I cannot imagine what was going through your head as you committed this evil act,” Smith told him.

The son is the second Fredette headed to prison in McDaniel’s murder.

His father, Joshuah Larry Fredette, also pleaded guilty for his role in the slaying. His murder charge was reduced to voluntary manslaughter in a plea deal on Jan. 23, when he was sentenced to 30 years in prison with 15 to serve and the rest on probation.

The father pleaded guilty also to evidence tampering, for collecting the bullet casings at the crime scene and hiding them.

What happened?

When McDaniel was found dead about 10 p.m. in the carport of her Rosewood Drive home, off Buena Vista Road east of I-185, she had been stabbed 23 times with a kitchen knife and shot six times with a .25-caliber pistol.

“He wanted her gone,” Novak said, when asked what incited such violence.

Johnson said Hagan Fredette wanted McDaniel out of his father’s life, fearing he would lose his father’s affection after growing up without his mother.

Novak said that on the day of the murder, Hagan Fredette was carrying a pistol he stole from his employer. He searched online for information on how many shots it would take to kill someone with a .25-caliber.

That evening, when his father took McDaniel’s two sons ages 8 and 11 around the corner to a Burger King on Buena Vista Road, the son joined them, but jumped out of of the truck at a stop sign and cut through a neighbor’s yard back to McDaniel’s house.

The neighbor’s security cameras recorded him passing through, Novak said. When he got back, neither he nor McDaniel spoke as he shot her, he told police, but she apparently did not die from those wounds.

Hagan Fredette briefly left the scene then, walking out into the street.

The father later told investigators that his son called his cell phone to say McDaniel still was breathing, a detective testified at the suspects’ 2020 Recorder’s Court hearing.

“At that point, Fredette said he said something to his son to the effect of, ‘Well, if you’re going to kill her, you need to kill her because otherwise you’re leaving a witness,’” the officer said.

Novak said police found a record of calls from that time span on the Fredettes’ phones.

The son then went back and used a butcher knife he found on the ground to stab McDaniel repeatedly, before washing the blade and putting it in a cabinet, authorities said.

Novak said the knife still was wet when police confiscated it, and tests showed it had McDaniel’s DNA on the blade.

Hagan Fredette afterward took the keys to McDaniel’s Chevrolet Suburban and drove it to a nearby house being renovated, and parked there.

McDaniel was dead in the lawn chair when Joshuah Fredette came back from Burger King.

The aftermath

During Friday’s sentencing, a victim’s advocate read a statement on behalf of the boys’ father, who said both sons were traumatized by what they experienced.

One has nightmares from which he wakes up “screaming hysterically, crying that zombies are under his bed trying to get him,” the dad wrote.

The other child has anger issues, and falls into his father’s arms crying, “because he misses the best part of his life, his mother,” Skipper McDaniel wrote. “He needs intensive therapy just to stay normal.”

A cousin also sent a statement, writing of Hagan Fredette, “I know he never liked Emily, but he has taken a mother away from her children.... She loved her boys, and always put them first.”

McDaniel had “a special love and bond with her boys,” said McDaniel’s mother, who lost her only child: “I have pictures of her in my house, and it only takes a look at them, and I just fall apart.... It’s just too much to take in.”

A flawed indictment

Novak dropped Hagan Fredette’s other charges because of flaws in his indictment, which a grand jury delivered under a previous district attorney’s administration.

Besides murder, he was indicted April 21, 2021, on charges of aggravated assault, using a firearm to commit a felony, and theft by taking for stealing the pistol.

But on the counts other than murder, the indictment had the wrong date, stating the offenses occurred “on or about the 19th day of September, 1920.”

Because Hagan Fredette at the time was a juvenile charged as an adult, he had to be indicted within 180 days, under Georgia law. Novak feared that were he re-indicted to correct the errors, after the 180 days had passed, the case would have been kicked back to juvenile court.

Had that happened, the maximum sentence he would have faced was five years in confinement, and that would have been unacceptable, she said.

McDaniel’s mother told Judge Smith the family needed some resolution.

“We just need to get some closure,” she said. “There is no way we will ever get justice.”