BROCKTON, Mass. –
A Massachusetts man who told police he was exorcising a demon and performing a baptism when he pushed his father’s head underwater several times has been found guilty of involuntary manslaughter in his death.
A jury found Jack Callahan, 22, guilty Thursday after an eight-day trial. Callahan is scheduled to be sentenced on May 3.
In June 2021, Duxbury police received a call that Callahan, then 19, was behaving erratically and that his father, Scott Callahan, 57, was missing near a pond in a park.
Prosecutors said police found Jack Callahan in a home distraught and hyperventilating. Fire department officials found Scott Callahan submerged in the pond around the same time. He was later pronounced dead at a hospital.
Investigators said at first the young man was trying to help his father, who had left a facility where he was being treated for alcohol abuse. The two took a carpool from Boston to the pond area. The two began fighting, prosecutors said.
Scott Callahan’s cause of death was drowning and the manner of death was homicide, prosecutors said.
Jack Callahan, accused of murder, pleaded not guilty. He told police in 2021 that he believed his father was possessed by a demon and that he needed to be baptized and exorcised, investigators said. That information was not included in Callahan’s trial, according to The Patriot Ledger.
Callahan’s attorney had called the investigation “shoddy.” He said the state did not have enough evidence to convict Callahan.