In his videotaped confession, recorded the morning of the shooting, Joseph looked far smaller than a normal 10-year-old. It’s hard to know why this is—he was tall for his age: an even 5 feet. But there was something in his affect that made him seem tiny. Sitting on a blue bench, his hands resting on his scuffed up knees, Joseph wore jean shorts and a black t-shirt that said, "Video Games vs. Homework." His sneakers were so worn that a couple of his toes protruded. As a detective read Joseph his rights, his stepmother, Krista, stroked his hair, which was crooked because the boy had cut it himself. He did that sometimes.

The detective asked if Joseph knew the difference between right and wrong. He said yes. Give me an example of something you did that was wrong, the detective said. "Well," he responded, matter-of-fact, "I shot my dad." Joseph took Krista’s hand. There were no tears.

Joseph told the detective that a few days before, his father had threatened to kill the family. "He said he was gonna turn off the smoke alarms and burn the whole house down when we were asleep," he said. "That really scared me." Speaking with a slight lisp, Joseph said his Dad had recently thrown a glass in Krista’s face, cutting her. He said he was afraid Dad was going to do something that would make Mom go away. Joseph called his stepmother Mom. He hadn’t seen his real mom in more than six years. "I didn’t want my mom to leave," he said of Krista. "Dad was kinda mean. So I thought maybe it would be him to leave."

Joseph didn’t think of killing his father until right before he did it, he said, when he woke up suddenly in his upstairs bedroom. He knew the low shelf where his father kept the loaded .357. "I wasn’t really thinking about if he was gonna die or get unconscious," he said. "I just thought maybe... he might learn a lesson... I was trying to get him to know how I feel when I get hurt... Then maybe we could go back to being friends and start all over." So Joseph got the gun and went downstairs. Recalling what happened next, the boy said he got as close as he could to his sleeping father—"It had to be less than one feet from the couch"—and squeezed the trigger. "That’s a loud gun," he told the detective.

At one point during the interrogation, the detective left the room. That’s when Krista—a plump, brown-haired woman of 25—handed Joseph a takeout box containing a burger and fries. "You just eat," she urged, and Joseph complied. Chewing, he looked puzzled. "I just think I’m gonna miss Dad kinda," he told Mom. "If he’s dead."

The first day of his trial, Joseph—then 12—sat beside his lawyer, Matthew Hardy, in a fifth floor courtroom in downtown Riverside, 60 miles east of Los Angeles. As he listened to the charges against him, I took his measure. Lanky and twitchy, he wore charcoal pants and a lavender short-sleeved polo shirt one size too big for him. Despite the appetite suppressing effects of the many medications he took to control his behavior, he had grown four inches and gained 16 pounds during his 18 months in juvenile hall. But he still looked like a child. His hair stuck to his head in a way that suggested he’d tried to comb it to look presentable. He kept adjusting a pair of rectangular eyeglasses.

Rising to address the court, Chief District Attorney Mike Soccio knew he had a tough job ahead. "All you have to hear is somebody killed a Nazi, and most people say, ’Good,’" he told me later, noting that Joseph was a "sympathetic killer" whose sad history and frail, vacant affect would tug at everyone in the courtroom. The defendant tugged at Soccio, too. In his 23 years as a prosecutor, he’d never tried a child for anything, let alone murder.