Ruminations

COVID Symptoms -- Amityville Horror

"They all did the right thing. They wee all concerned about their friend. It was horrible that they had to witness this."

"We don't know what they witnessed. There were a number of people on this conference call."

Suffolk County Police Detective Lt.Kevin Beyrer, homicide unit commanding officer

"This is a shocking and disturbing case."

"By the defendant’s own admission, he brutally stabbed his father repeatedly until he was certain [the victim] was dead."

Suffolk County District Attorney Timothy Sini.

Thomas Scully-Powers is pictured in police custody Friday, May 22, after being charged with second-degree murder in the slaying of his 72-year-old dad, Dwight Powers, in their Amityville, L.I., apartment yesterday. (News 12 Long Island)

Zoom has had a lot of bad press lately. The fairly new-on-the-scene video chat platform has been vulnerable to malicious intrusions with hackers displaying Nazi imagery, racist messages and child pornography during conference calls on Zoom. The platform has pledged to patch these vulnerabilities with security updates against the 'zoom bombers'. What they surely never might have anticipated was that their platform would be home to a sinister and deadly drama that suddenly ended someone's life while horrified conference-call 'attendees' watched.

Police have taken a man by the name of Thomas Scully-Powers, 32, to hospital for treatment of minor injuries. Injuries the man sustained from leaping out of a second-floor window from the home of his father. The same Scully-Powers has been charged with second-degree murder. He was last seen by 20 virtual attendees of a Zoom conference call with his father, 72-year-old Dwight Powers, naked and behaving quite erratically.

Since those same viewers had just seconds earlier seen their fellow conference-call attendee suddenly slump from his chair, disappearing from the screen, while heavy breathing was heard, it was relatively simple to imagine something quite, quite wrong had occurred in the home in Amityville, New York. Strange and frightening enough to those witnessing the event that several people on the video chat dialled 911.

In short order responding police officers knocked at the door of the house where they determined Dwight Powers lived, in fact within the hour they arrived at the address where the door was opened by the younger Scully-Powers who immediately on viewing the visitors slammed it shut and swiftly disappeared upstairs. Then leaped from a second-floor window, and fled.

He made his escape roughly a kilometre distance before he was arrested. Conference call witnesses informed police that they had watched aghast as a nude Scully-Powers stripped sheets from a bed to lay them on the floor, seemingly over something. And presumably that 'something' was the dead body of his father whom he had repeatedly stabbed until he was dead.

"Bedsheets were being ripped off the bed by a gentleman who appeared to be naked as well as bald and he had a tattoo on his left arm, and then he placed the bedsheets on the floor as if he was covering something up."

Unnamed witness

"By the defendant’s own admissions, he brutally stabbed his own father repeatedly until he was certain he was dead."

"[Scully-Powers admitted he stabbed his father approximately 15 times and used] several different knives because the blades kept bending."

Suffolk County District Attorney Tim Sini