A Florida man has admitted to “snapping” his 76-year-old grandmother’s neck after she poked him in the back with a steak knife, police say.
According to an arrest report, Nicholas Ivey, 29, also repeatedly punched and stomped on her head while she was lying on the ground during the violent attack in Vero Beach, south of Orlando, last Sunday.
In interviews with detectives from the Indian River County Sheriff’s Office, Ivey admitted to killing his grandmother, saying she had “come at him” with a kitchen steak knife and poked him in the back; details from the arrest report were summarized by local news affiliate CBS 12.
The arrest report described how Ivey, who stands 6’1 and weighs 350 lbs, moved his grandmother’s body to a bedroom, and proceeded to clean up the scene; wiping blood from the floor with towels, washing his bloody sweatshirt, and placing the knife in a drawer.
Following the alleged murder, he took his grandmother’s credit cards and Nissan sedan and drove to a nearby store, where he bought beer and cigarettes. After returning home, he called his dad and confessed to killing his grandmother, Patricia Dibella, the arrest report said.
He said the reason he hadn’t called 911 immediately was that he first wanted to discuss the situation with his father.
Ivey’s dad contacted the sheriff’s office, and deputies went to perform a welfare check at Dibella’s apartment on the evening of Monday, February 2. When they arrived around 8:15 pm, they found a woman’s body lying diagonally on a bed; when they tried to lift her arm, it was “extremely stiff.”
Ivey was subsequently taken into custody and told deputies he was in the same sweatshirt he’d been wearing when he had killed his grandmother the previous evening. “She came at me with a knife,” he told law enforcement, according to the arrest report.
Once at the sheriff’s office, the report said, he was taken to the Criminal Investigations Division and confessed to killing Dibella.
The sheriff’s office and medical examiner’s office processed the crime scene and secured the Nissan sedan for forensic examination, and Dibella’s next of kin was notified of her death.
Authorities are yet to file charges against Ivey over the death of his grandmother, but he faces a raft of other counts in the meantime, including grand theft auto, criminal use of personal identification, unlawful possession of stolen credit cards, and fraudulent use of credit cards.
Ivey is being held on a total of $400,000 bond at the Indian River County Jail; his arraignment is scheduled for March 10.
