An Idaho man has been charged with killing his mother, a 67-year-old Utah woman, by stabbing her in the back.
Shawn Ryan Andrews, 28, of Pocatello, Idaho, has been charged in First District Court with murder, a first-degree felony; and three counts of obstruction of justice, second-degree felonies.
According to a probable cause statement, officers from the North Park Police Department were dispatched to the North Point Apartments in North Logan at 3:11 p.m. Saturday, and discovered Debra Andrews lying on the floor. She had been stabbed in the back. First responders tried to revive her, but she was pronounced dead at 3:50 p.m.
One witness told police she heard a “commotion and people fighting” inside the apartment, followed by a “thump" and someone yelling, “Call 911!” She saw a white male dressed in black run from the apartment with “something wrapped around his arm.” A second witness told police she saw a white male dressed in black carrying a black backpack running from the apartment toward a nearby Walmart.
Another of the victim’s sons, Hugo Andrews, told police his brother, Shawn, and two other people were in the apartment with his mother. According to the probable cause statement, Hugo told police he was sleeping when he “heard a thump and came out to find his mother had been stabbed and no one else was in the apartment.”
Shawn Andrews was arrested a short time later near 1200 N. Main by Logan City Police officers; a black backpack and a bloody knife were located in the Walmart parking lot. Surveillance video from the apartment complex and the Walmart show him running away from the apartment to the store, discarding items as he ran, police said.
According to police, Shawn Andrews initially denied he was in the apartment when his mother was stabbed but he “changed his story multiple times." He claimed he was in the bathroom; heard his brother scream for help; and then “exited the bathroom and observed his mother on the floor with his knife sticking out of her back.” Police wrote that Shawn Andrews “claimed that his mother told him to run, so he took the knife from her body and placed it in his backpack and fled the scene.”
According to the probable cause statement, Shawn Andrews “changed his story again” and “admitted that he had stabbed his mother in the back.” He provided “several different explanations” for stabbing her.
He was booked into the Cache County jail and is being held without bail.
