The best birthdays tend to include cake and messy parties and sometimes, depending on your idea of excitement, oddly shaped balloon animals. The worst ones, it seems, are often marked by gifts of socks and a definitive lack of cake. But David Seifert has set a whole new standard for “worst birthday ever”, by spending a portion of his 40th birthday in the Calhoun County Circuit Court, being sentenced to over forty years in prison for shooting his mother.
Seifert, a convicted sex offender who already spent 20 years in prison for sexually assaulting a 5-year-old girl, has now been sentenced to prison for 39 to 80 years for assault with intent to murder, with an additional 2 years tacked on for use of a firearm in the commission of a felony.
Seifert, who had been staying at his adoptive mother’s home in Sheridan Township since his release from prison on March 1st, 2013, was arrested there by the Calhoun County Sheriff Department on August 24th. Deputies had been directed there after being alerted to the fact that Seifert had shot his mother with a .22 calibre rifle while she slept in bed.
Mother saved by the fact that the gun jammed
Patricia Seifert, who had woken up to the sound of the gun going off and a lot of pain, was saved by the fact that the gun jammed after one shot. She managed to escape, having been shot in the shoulder, and fled her house in a pickup truck while her son stood and fired at the departing vehicle.
She sought refuge at a nearby friend’s home, and contacted police to report the assault. When asked why he had chosen to shoot his mother in her bed with no warning, he refused to provide a definitive or rational reason. His mother has since speculated that it may have been because she had asked him to mow the lawn the previous day, and then asked him about it again later on when he still hadn’t done it.
Seifert’s mother did not attend the sentencing, but she provided a written statement for the judge, which was read for the court. In it, she called her son an “evil coward who preys on children and women” and explained that she still lives in constant fear and pain, having more than 60 pellets still lodged inside her body.
During his previous 19 year prison sentence, Seifert accumulated 107 tickets for major misconduct, which usually decreases a prisoner’s chances of parole. This, combined with his history of child sexual abuse and the fact that he shot his own mother with no known provocation, led Calhoun County Circuit Judge Conrad Sindt to say that he had no difficulty imposing the maximum possible sentence in this case.