10 Feb 2006
By Oliver Mackson
Times Herald-Record
omackson@th-record.com
Goshen - As his mother listened, a 13-year-old boy told state
police how his twin brother was shot in the back by his grandpa on
Thanksgiving Day.
Michael Kingston Jr. talked about how his grandpa, Wayne Kingston,
59, and Michael's cousin, Jake Kingston, 38, went off to recover two
illegally hunted does before they lifted a finger to help the bleeding
boy.
By the time they called for help, it was too late. David Kingston
was dead from a rifle shot. Yesterday, his grandfather and his cousin
were charged with second-degree manslaughter.
They were sent to Orange County Jail last night, pending
arraignment today in County Court. Michael Kingston Jr. testified
against the two men to a grand jury, according to his mother, Tonia
Ellis Albritton of Port Jervis.
Michael and his twin brother were deer-hunting with their relatives
in some woods off Route 42 in Sparrowbush on the day of the shooting.
After his brother was hit by the bullet from his grandfather's
rifle, "Mikey thought they were going into the woods to get David.
Instead, they got the deer first," Albritton said during an interview
this week.
Her son told state police said that the adults eventually loaded
David into their Jeep, but stopped at the home of Jake Kingston's
father before they called 911.
At about noon that day, Albritton said the Kingstons met her at
home and gave her the news about her son. But at first, she said, they
told her that he fell and hit his head.
When she accompanied them to Bon Secours Community Hospital in Port
Jervis, she found her son lying in a pool of blood, and when hospital
staff rolled him over, she pointed out that the source of the blood
was a wound in his upper left back.
Hospital staffers gave state police the same account, although they
said a doctor found the bullet wound in the boy's back.
As state police, conservation police and Deerpark police gathered
evidence in the aftermath of the shooting, prosecutors opted to
present the case to a grand jury instead of having police immediately
bring charges.
At the time, the twins were legally in the custody of their
grandparents, Wayne and Kathleen Kingston. But last month, after
Michael Jr.'s law guardian mentioned Wayne Kingston's impending
indictment in Family Court, a judge allowed Michael to leave his
grandparents' home and move in temporarily with his father.
Albritton hopes to regain custody of her surviving son. Meanwhile,
she and her family are trying to figure out how her son could have
been shot by his own grandfather, and why neither adult immediately
tried to get help.
"They said he fell and hit his head. They said he fell, those sons
of bitches," sobbed the twins' maternal grandfather, David Ellis of
Cuddebackville. "They weren't even worried about him. They were
worried about their stupid deer and covering their asses so they
didn't get in trouble."
