An Oakland teenager accused of murdering his adoptive parents in January expressed frustration toward them and was involved in several confrontations with them in the months before their deaths, a defense witness testified Monday.
Asked by prosecutor Joseph Goethals if Moses Kamin had expressed anger toward his parents, school psychologist Isabelle Waigi said, "I can't say anger, but he was frustrated."
Waigi said that on one occasion he pushed his mother, 50-year-old Susan Poff, up against a wall and held her arms because "she was acting up."
Asked by Goethals if Kamin had told her he'd been involved in a physical altercation with his father, 55-year-old Robert Kamin, Waigi said the teenager told him "his father used to hit him but he didn't hit him anymore."
Waigi said Moses Kamin told her "his father had better not touch him" and he felt he needed to protect himself from his father.
Kamin, who was 15 at the time and is now 16, is being prosecuted as an adult on two counts of murder for allegedly strangling his adoptive parents, who were found dead in a PT Cruiser parked outside their home at 284 Athol Ave. in Oakland about 9:30 p.m. on Jan. 27.
The couple, who adopted Kamin when he was six years old, worked for the San Francisco Department of Public Health.
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Robert Kamin had worked with the San Francisco Sheriff's Department since 1994, providing mental health services to inmates, as well as working as a psychologist at Haight Ashbury Free Clinics-Walden House.
Susan Poff had worked with the San Francisco Department of Public Health's Housing and Urban Health Clinic since 2004 as a physician assistant.
Moses Kamin admitted in an interview with two Oakland police officers on Jan. 28 that was played at the beginning of his preliminary hearing last Tuesday that he strangled his parents with a chokehold he had learned at a martial arts school.
He said he had just been suspended from school for smoking marijuana and he didn't want to deal with his mother's anger.
The Oakland police officers who interrogated Kamin read him his Miranda rights advising him of his right to have an attorney, but his defense lawyer, Andrew Steckler, is seeking to have Kamin's confession thrown out because he doesn't think Kamin had the experience or intelligence necessary to understand what those rights meant.
