An Oakland teenager who murdered the parents who adopted him and tried to burn their bodies in their car said Friday he didn't want the forgiveness of his victims' families.
None was forthcoming.
"I'm sorry for the crime that I committed," 16-year-old Moses Kamin said, moments before an Alameda County judge sentenced him to 25 years to life in prison. "I hope none of you forgive me for my crime. I know you all think of me as a monster or something else. ... I'm just going to fade away. I hope none of you remember me ever again."
Kamin was 15 when he strangled his mother, Susan Poff, 50, and father, Robert Kamin, 55, last January at the family's home on Athol Avenue near Lake Merritt in Oakland.
Charged as an adult, Kamin pleaded guilty in December to first-degree murder for killing his father and second-degree murder for killing Poff.
Before Superior Court Judge Jeffrey Horner pronounced sentence in his Oakland courtroom, relatives of the victims expressed bewilderment that Kamin would kill the two people closest to him.
"Moses, you made a choice to embrace evil," said David Poff, Poff's brother. "I ask you to look for the goodness that is in this world."
Teresa Poff, another sibling, said, "Moses, what will you do now? You killed the only two people who loved you."
Robert Kamin was a clinical psychologist for inmates at the San Francisco County Jail. Poff worked for the San Francisco Department of Public Health as a physician assistant.
The teen told police he argued with Poff on Jan. 26, 2012, over being suspended from his charter school for using marijuana. Authorities say he was also facing expulsion.
After killing Poff by choking her with his hands and a shirt, he hid her body in a room and waited in the dark for his father to return home, police said.
The teen, who stands 5 feet 9 and weighs 200 pounds, grabbed his father from behind and strangled him as well, covering his head with a plastic bag and sitting on him, said Deputy District Attorney Stacie Pettigrew.
Authorities believe he used a chokehold that he learned at a martial arts school.
The boy hid the bodies in the back of his family's car parked on the street and tried to set the vehicle on fire, police said.
His attorney, Assistant Public Defender Drew Steckler, said the slayings were "heinous, horrible and unforgivable," and that his client had no explanation for why they occurred. "I hope he searches his soul and finds an answer," Steckler said.
The defense attorney said Kamin has dissociative disorder as a result of childhood trauma he endured while living with his birth mother and while being shifted from one foster home to another. Those issues figured significantly in what happened, he said.
But Pettigrew said the defense's theory was contrived and that Kamin had simply acted out violently for reasons that had nothing to do with his troubled past.
Henry K. Lee is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: hlee@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @henryklee
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