Diary Entry Says Girl Killed Her Sister, 4 : Crime: Parents find journal after the 14-year-old runs away from home, police say. She admits writing the statements, but only to gain attention.

A 14-year-old girl confided to a Christmas diary that she smothered her 4-year-old sister with a pillow five months ago, police said Wednesday.

Officials said the diary’s only entry, written on the first page and dated Jan. 1, reads:

“Dear Diary: Well, it’s the New Year so I’m going to start telling you everything dearest to me. I have to get something off my back. I killed my little sister,” the teen-ager wrote in the diary her parents gave her last week.

“I went into her room and got her and took her into my room and told her I loved her and covered her mouth and suffocated her. You’re the first person I’ve told. Well, I feel better.”

The chilling diary was found Saturday by the girl’s parents after she ran away from home. They called police after discussing it with the family’s pastor.

The teen-ager appeared in juvenile court Wednesday for arraignment on a murder charge. She did not enter a plea but has previously denied causing her sister’s death. She was ordered held in a juvenile detention facility until her next court appearance Jan. 6.

The youngster, dressed in a green shirt and tan pants, mumbled “yes” when her attorney, Alameda County Public Defender Stephen Homer, asked if she understood her legal rights.

Both parents, two family friends and a cousin were present during the hearing. They refused to speak with reporters.

The girl initially refused to acknowledge to police that she wrote the entry. Later, according to officers, she admitted writing the statements but insisted she did so only to gain attention.

The diary entry was “significant” but only one link in a police investigation that started after the 4-year-old was found dead in her bed by her mother on Aug. 18, Sgt. Mike Phillips said.

“We focused on her mental stability from the start,” he said of the 14-year-old. “But we needed something more than the fact that she had a propensity for doing such an act.”

Phillips said the teen-ager had a long history of psychological problems but would not go into details.

“We are not experts on giving psychiatric evaluations,” he said.

The names of the victim and her sister were withheld by police because of their ages.

The teen-ager was identified in a police news release only as a “white female juvenile 14 years old.”

Police arrested the girl about 3 a.m. Sunday at her boyfriend’s house. But she was not charged until Tuesday, after the coroner’s office went over the case again and determined “there was no pre-existing medical condition that would have caused the traumatic asphyxia.”

The coroner initially had ruled that the 4-year-old died of “traumatic asphyxia,” which simply means her breathing stopped.

The parents told police that the child suffered from asthma but was fine when they put her in bed. The child took medication and used a special machine to make sure the medicine went deep into her lungs.

But natural causes did not explain the trauma of the death, and the police investigation “focused on unnatural all the way,” Phillips said.