A 16-year-old is going on trial in the U.S. after his mother caught him hiring a hitman to kill her. Cory Ryder was arrested after a sting operation in June this year after a woman he trusted - the mother of one of his friends - took him to a hotel room to meet someone he believed was a hitman, but who was in reality an undercover policeman.
The teen, like other teens, had rowed with his parents over Playstation and TV, and had been grounded.
His mother, Shannan Troiano, 35, recalled the night of the sting at an earlier hearing.
Waiting at home to hear the results on June 2, she told her husband Joey that Cory would never go through with it and frantically tidied the house. When the police called later to say her son was in custody and would be charged with attempted murder, she burst into tears, according to the Washington Post.
Mrs Troiano explained how her emotions were torn between being an agonised mother and an attempted murder victim.
"I miss him being at home," she said, "and I miss us joking around and kidding around. And then in the very same breath – I don't know what this kid will do, because it's not my son. That can't be my little boy sitting there."
Police say that Cory offered the undercover officer his stepfather's new pickup truck as payment for killing his parents. "Two bullets is all it takes," he is alleged to have said.
His mother, a financial manager at Patuxent River naval station, and stepfather, a computer specialist, had lived an ordinary life with Cory and his two stepsisters. Mrs Troiano had left his father when Cory was little more than a year old but, by the time she remarried, her son's behaviour was getting steadily worse.
He walked out of lessons at Spring Ridge Middle School in Lexington Park, smashed a fire extinguisher case and then broke into the county fairgrounds, where he vandalised property. A judge sentenced him to supervised probation and his parents attended no less than 36 meetings with the authorities about him.
But Cory dropped out of school and then, after stealing $45 (£22) from his sister's piggy bank, had a fight with his mother, which led to him being kicked out of home. He has since told officials that he was upset about being thrown out of the house and that he felt pressured to talk to the man in the hotel.
Cory insists that he never intended to have his parents killed and that he wanted to call the police that night in the hotel room. A judge has ruled that he should be tried in the juvenile system, which means that he cannot be held beyond his 21st birthday.
He has written to his mother, saying: "You know I love you with all my heart mom!"
But his attempt at reconciliation is not swaying his mother, who fears he is being manipulative.
She wanted him tried in an adult court where he would have faced a much longer sentence.
"He needs to understand what he did was wrong," she told the court in September. "I'm scared to death that if this kid is serious, and they put him in a three-month programme, they're going to release him to the street."
Teen Hires Hitman Kill Mom
Teen Hires Hitman Kill Mom