Treacy's Confession: “I'm a Monster”

Ratley beating suspect's sad story, reunion with mother revealed in new video

Alone with his thoughts in a police interrogation room hours after his vicious attack on 15-year-old Josie Lou Ratley, Wayne Treacy held his head in his shackled hands and said what anyone who witnessed the beating may have been thinking.

"I'm a monster, I'm a monster," the 15-year-old muttered to himself.

The utterance was just one of several intense moments in the video of Treacy's two-hour interrogation by Broward Sheriff's detectives, released Friday morning by Treacy's lawyer, Russell Williams.

Excerpts of the teen's questioning, posted on the Sun-Sentinel's website, show a sobbing Treacy expressing remorse over the attack to the officer interrogating him, as well as an emotional meeting with his mother.

"Wayne, why would you ruin your life like that, why would you hit a girl?" asks mom Donna Powers, when she's let into the room for five minutes alone with her son. "Wayne, oh my God. I hope she lives Wayne, I hope she lives." 

"I didn't mean to hurt her, I didn't plan on hitting her," Treacy tells his mother between crying fits. "You know I rant when I talk to my friends, how I say stuff like that.

"I only wanted to yell at her. And when I saw her, everything just...and the next thing I know...I started hyperventilating and I started crying."

Treacy was arrested on March 17 outside Deerfield Beach Middle School after the attack that put Ratley into a medically induced coma. Treacy went to school, looking for Ratley after a heated text message exchange in which the young girl criticized Treacy's relationship with a 13-year-old and brought up the suicide of Treacy's brother last October.

Questioned by Sheriff's Detective Shane Schroeder, Treacy claims he blacked out.

"You pretty much walked up to her and punched her in the face and fell down and you started slamming her face on the ground and then you kicked her in the head a few times, "Schroeder tells Treacy. "Do you have any idea how many times you did it?"

"No, it just went blurry," Treacy says. "I don't know, everything just kind of disappeared."

"If you blacked out, how did you know that you tried to kill someone?" Schroeder asks, apparently referring to Treacy's texts to a friend after the attack.

"Because at first when they said that she was bleeding that she was unconscious, that I freaking kicked her in the head like five or six times and then I started crying and freaking hyperventilating," a rambling, emotional Treacy replies.

"Just to scream at her and just to get in her face. I wasn't, I didn't actually want to hit her," Treacy says, tears welling up. "I mean, I don't want to get in trouble. I'm smart, I'm, I don't want to be like my brother, my brother got in trouble with the police a lot. I don't want to be in trouble with the police."

"You texted how you were gonna do it before you even did it," the detective says. "Do you understand what I'm saying to you Wayne? So are you sorry for what you did?"

"Of course, why do you think I've been crying?" the teen answers back.

"Well, then why don't you tell me the full truth and make me believe it?" Schroeder says.

"Because I don't believe it, I don't believe I did that," Treacy says, slamming his hand on the table.

Treacy begins to sob and cry heavily when the detective brings up Ratley's condition.

"This girl, Wayne, is in pretty bad shape right now dude," Schroeder says. "She's um, having to have brain surgery right now."

"Oh my God," the teen replies.

Ratley suffered severe brain damage in the attack, spending over 40 days in intensive care. She was finally released from a rehabilitation center last week, but faces months of rehab at home and must spend months, possibly years relearning basic human functions.

Williams believes the interrogation video shows Treacy had no control over his actions at the time of the attack.

Treacy has been charged with first-degree attempted murder as an adult. He's been in a juvenile detention center and Broward County jail since the attack.

In his last moments with his mother in the interrogation room, Treacy gets a hug from his mom.

"I'm sorry mom," he says, still crying.

"It'll be alright, it'll be alright," she replies. "Be safe."

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