Who is Scott Kologi? NJ man, 20, sentenced to 150 years for murder of mom, dad, sister and grandma
Warning: Graphic Content
MONMOUTH COUNTY, NEW JERSEY: A New Jersey man, who gunned down four family members when he was 16 years old in 2017, was sentenced on Thursday, June 30, to 150 years in prison. A Monmouth County jury found Scott Kologi, now 20, guilty of four counts of murder and one count of possessing a weapon for an unlawful purpose.
Less than an hour before the new year, on December 31, 2017, Kologi shot and killed his mother, father, sister, and a companion of his grandfather considered his grandmother. Squeezing the trigger as many as 14 times, the then 16-year-old struck Linda Kologi, 44, Steven Kologi, 42, Brittany Kologi, 18, and Mary Schulz, 70, in the Kologi’s Long Branch house, Monmouth County prosecutors said. In November 2019, the prosecutor’s office announced that Kologi would be tried as an adult.
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“These were acts of evil, carried out by someone who knew exactly what he was doing,” Monmouth County Assistant Prosecutor Sean Brennan said during the hearing, according to a press release the office issued Thursday. “He killed them because he could. He killed them because he wanted to.” Monmouth County Supreme Court Judge Marc LeMieux said that the murders caused “immeasurable harm". Kologi will not be eligible for parole until 127 years and six months into his sentence.
“The intention of this court is that this defendant never see the light of the outside of a jail cell ever again,’’ LeMieux reportedly said during the hearing. “I hope one day, you realize the magnitude of what you’ve done here.”
The quadruple slaying
On the night of the murders, Kologi called his mother up to his room. With the lights switched off, he shot her dead. When Kologi's father rushed up to see what had happened, he gunned him down too. Kologi then went on to slaughter his sister, who was home from her first semester in college, as well as his grandfather's companion.
Kologi reportedly had earplugs in to protect himself from the sound of the high-powered weapon. He had even researched whether the gun could be used against police officers with bulletproof vests, in case they responded. Kologi's brother and grandfather, who were in the house at the time of the murder, managed to escape. "Even though they physically survived, they will still have to deal with the mental scars of what they saw," Brennan said.
Kologi's lawyers have urged jurors to find him not guilty by reason of insanity. “Scott is schizophrenic and autistic and went untreated his entire life. That is the great tragedy of this case,” Richard Lomurro, who represented Kologi at trial, previously told NJ Advance Media. “This isn’t someone who kills 20 people at a concert because they have a radical viewpoint or are filled with rage. It was a mentally ill boy who suffered an acute delusional episode. He had no appreciation for what he did or the scale of the tragedy then, and he has none now.”
“The bottom line is, Scott is not a cold-blooded killer,’’ Lomurro has now said, according to the Asbury Park Press. “Scott is, and was, severely mentally ill. But he will be sent to state prison to be with cold-blooded killers.”