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Youth ranch murder: Teen charged

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — An Arizona teenager was charged with aggravated murder and other counts Friday in the brutal slaying of one worker and the assault on a second staffer at a southern Utah ranch for troubled teens.

Clay Brewer, 17, hit the counselor 10 times with a metal stick after “losing his mind” because of an addiction to pills that led him to be sent there, show charging documents.

Brewer told investigators that he woke up Tuesday morning feeling “heartless” and that drug addiction had taken over his life and was controlling him. He said the night before he had tried to kill himself by drinking bleach amid feelings that his parents didn’t love him and had betrayed him. He grabbed a metal fire stick from inside a cabin while nobody else was there.

The next morning, he was outside at a camp fire sitting in a circle where he wasn’t allowed to talk to anybody else when counselor Jimmy Woolsey, 61, came out to check them. Brewer told investigators he liked Woolsey but wanted to escape.

“When you’re coming off of drugs and tobacco like I was, you lose your mind,” Brewer told investigators after the incident. “That’s where I was at. I lost my mind.”

Brewer, who had arrived just days earlier, decided he need to run after realizing what he had done. He grabbed Woolsey’s keys from his body but couldn’t get the truck started. He came back and attacked another worker, Alicia Keller, who survived. Authorities say Keller kept him from getting inside the cabin where other kids were. Keller threw him her car keys after he threatened to break a cabin window and he left in her vehicle.

Brewer was arrested after deputies en route to the ranch spotted him driving Keller’s car into nearby Escalante at 60 mph in a 25 mph zone as parents were dropping kids off for school, according to the documents.

Prosecutors filed eight charges Friday that also include attempted aggravated murder and robbery. He was charged directly as an adult under Utah laws allowing serious cases against older teens to bypass juvenile court.

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