BLYTHE, Calif. (AP) -- A little boy was smothered with a bed pillow by his 6-year-old sister and 5-year-old cousin, and investigators said the death was intentional.
The girls will not be charged in the death of 3-year-old Damien Stiffler, Riverside County District Attorney Grover Trask said Friday.
The children had been playing Sunday morning in the back yard of their grandmother's home in this desert town on the California-Arizona line. The siblings' 12-year-old sister was inside, along with two sleeping adults.
"They got to playing too rough. It got out of hand," said the grandmother, Mary Stiffler said in Friday's Press-Enterprise.
Stiffler said the girls told her that they tried to push the boy's head in a mud puddle, but he got away. The girls tackled him, and he fell on a board. One girl put the pillow on his head and sat on it while the other sat on his legs until he stopped moving, she said.
The boy's father, Gerald Stiffler, arrived at the home to find Damien motionless in the yard and tried to revive him. He was pronounced dead later that morning.
A funeral was to be held Friday.
Interviews with the girls have shown that they intended to kill the boy, said Sgt. Mark Lohman, spokesman for the Riverside County Sheriff's Department.
"It was not an accidental death," he said Wednesday. Medical examiners ruled suffocation as the cause.
The children cannot be charged with a crime under California law because they are younger than 14, Lohman said.
"We're talking about kids who are kindergarten- and first-grade age," he said. "This is one for the books."
Detectives planned to turn their homicide report over to the district attorney's office within two weeks.
The boy's 12-year-old sister and two adults, who were both sleeping, were inside the house.
The girls, whose names were not released, are staying with their families in Blythe. Investigators are deciding whether to place the girls in foster care, Trask said.
