Boy charged in killing to be moved to juvenile facility

An 11-year-old boy charged as an adult with killing his father’s pregnant fiancee will be moved from a county jail to a juvenile facility under a court order issued Tuesday.

A judge agreed that it was in Jordan Brown’s best interest to be housed in the Allencrest Juvenile Detention Center northwest of Pittsburgh.

Though Brown is charged as an adult in the shooting death of 26-year-old Kenzie Marie Houk, his attorney said he would ask to have the case moved to a juvenile court.

“What we have learned is . . . that under Pennsylvania law he can continue to be . . . prosecuted as an adult and be housed in a secure juvenile detention center,” defense attorney Dennis Elisco said.

Brown is accused of shooting Houk in the head Friday, killing her and her fetus.

Hundreds of friends and family stood for hours in freezing temperatures to pay their respects to Houk at a viewing and funeral Tuesday. At the service, friends and family remembered her as a loving, joyful, stubborn woman who could never be persuaded to do something she was opposed to.

Jordan Brown and his father lived with Houk and her two small daughters in a farmhouse in the rural western Pennsylvania town of Wampum.

Authorities believe Friday’s killing was premeditated. They say Brown went downstairs with two guns but returned upstairs after Houk’s 7-year-old daughter saw him. They believe he then hid a gun in a blanket and went back downstairs to Houk’s bedroom and shot her in the back of the head.

Later, the 7-year-old girl told police, she saw the boy drop something on the ground from his pocket before they got on the school bus. Police said they found a spent shotgun shell in the same spot.

Houk’s mother, Debbie, said the boy had been threatening her daughter for at least two months and often gave her a hard time, especially when his father wasn’t around.

“It’s been at least two months that he’s made the threats,” Debbie Houk said, adding that Jordan “just bucked her [Kenzie] a lot when his dad wasn’t around.”