By Andy Furillo
afurillo@sacbee.com
"I did something really bad, man."
Police and prosecutors say that's what Jack Aaron Squires said just a few hours before authorities found his mother and grandmother shot and killed in their Sacramento home.
Squires, 47, went on trial today in Sacramento Superior Court for two counts of murder in the shooting deaths of his mother, Kathleen Roloff, 65, and his grandmother, Elma Alberta Matranga, 94.
The bodies of the two women were found in their home the morning of April 29, 2008, in the 600 block of Blackwood Street in the leafy Woodlake neighborhood of North Sacramento on the morning of April 29, 2008.
In her opening statement today, Deputy District Attorney Dawn Bladet said Squires made the incriminating remark to his brother in a telephone conversation in the pre-dawn hours before police found the two bodies.
Bladet told the six-man, six-woman jury that Squires killed the women for financial gain and that he was upset when his mother took out a $400,000 loan on the house and told Squires he wouldn't get a penny of it.
The prosecutor said Squires was caught on a video surveillance camera withdrawing money from an ATM at the Thunder Valley casino about the time of the killings.
Defense attorney Paul Irish said his client is not guilty. The lawyer questioned the credibility of Squires' brother, who related the defendant's purported admissions to investigators.
Irish said that Kathleen Roloff was suicidal and suggested that she killed her mother before turning the gun on herself.
The trial is being heard in front of Judge Robert M. Twiss.
Call The Bee's Andy Furillo, (916) 321-1141.
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