The family of a recent murder victim believes that his pet parrot might know the answer to the identity of the perpetrator that shot him.
Martin Duram, a resident of of Ensley Township, Michigan, was found shot in his home in May 2015, next to his wife Glenna, who survived a gunshot wound to the head. According to the NBC affiliate WOOD-TV, Glenna was initially treated as the sole survivor of the attack that killed her husband, but is now considered to be the major suspect in the case.
The evidence that Duram’s pet, an African gray parrot, might contain? The memory of his owner’s last words, described as an imitation of Duram’s voice, which proclaim the following: “Don’t fucking shoot!”
As The Washington Post reports:
The bird’s antics might be laughed off, were it not for the fact that Bud’s owner, 45-year-old Martin Duram, was fatally shot at his home in May 2015, according to ABC affiliate WABC. His body was found near his wife, Glenna, who had suffered a gunshot wound to her head but is alive. Although police initially assumed Glenna Duram was a victim of the shooting, police reports obtained by WOOD-TV reveal that she is now a suspect in the slaying.
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Relatives told the station that they think Martin Duram’s final moments were imprinted in the bird’s memory and that he continues to relive the slaying. They noted that Bud mimicked both Duram and his wife.
“I personally think he was there, and he remembers it and he was saying it,” the victim’s father, Charles Duram, said to the press.
According to WaPo, Duram’s ex-wife Christina Keller, who is now Bud’s new owner, also thinks that this is the case: the bird purportedly “has a habit of replaying voices of a man and a woman locked in a fierce disagreement,” she told the newspaper. She agrees with the sentiment that the bird’s theorized epitaph for Duram (“Don’t fucking shoot!”) were Keller’s ex-husband’s last words.
“I’m hearing two people in an intense argument,” Keller stated. “Two people that I know, voices that I recognize.”
“It’s intense,” she continued. “When it happens, my house turns cold.”
While local prosecutors are aware of Bud’s purported memorization of his owner’s verbal death knell, they have not considered any filmed evidence of the bird regurgitating this particular sentence for any sort of trial—a trial which will begin once local authorities conclude their investigation, hinging on whether any charges will actually be filed.
“Although the law allows charging on probable cause, I don’t like to do that, especially when you have a very serious case,” said attorney Robert Springstead. “When the investigation is done, I like to be satisfied there’s proof beyond a reasonable doubt.”
As of now, Mrs. Duram has no memory of the shooting, nor the three suicide notes she purportedly wrote for unspecified, respective relatives.
Another attorney named Michael Walsh told WaPo that no matter what, Bud’s words would be inadmissible in a court of law due to the fact that “ there’s no way to trace his dirty mouth.”
He proceeded to conjecture that Bud might have learned this phrase—and the argument that preambled it—from a television show.
“How did it get there?” Walsh said, referring to Bud’s mimicry. “If there’s no reliable way of making that determination, you can’t rule out that the bird witnessed a homicide or that the bird witnessed something on TV.”
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Image via YouTube.