Cops: Son says he beat mother, put her in oven

Even in a city where murder occurs almost daily, what Kendall Anderson confessed to doing to his mother after she took away his PlayStation 2 stands out.

A claw hammer, a hot oven and a stick were the weapons he used to slay her, according to the macabre confession to police that came to light yesterday during a preliminary hearing for the 11th-grader at the Daniel Boone School.

After hearing the ghastly story, Municipal Judge Karen Yvette Simmons ordered Anderson to stand trial on charges of murder, abuse of a corpse and possession of an instrument of crime.

The youth, whose eyes repeatedly darted from the judge to his defense attorney, said nothing during the hearing.

His mother, Rashida Anderson, 37, died of blunt-impact trauma, Assistant District Attorney Jennifer Bretschneider said.

"The evidence at the preliminary hearing, which showed the brutal, prolonged, thought-out murder of Rashida Anderson, becomes even more tragic when you learn that [she] was the mother of the defendant," Bretschneider said after the hearing.

Defense attorney Andrea Konow declined to comment.

After Rashida Anderson went to bed in her South Philadelphia rowhouse Nov. 26, her son paced for three hours contemplating whether to kill her, Anderson, 16, reportedly told homicide detectives.

After making up his mind, the thin youth went into his mother's bedroom and began beating the sleeping woman about the head and face with a claw hammer, he told detectives. As he repeatedly hit her, she rolled onto the floor on top of the PlayStation video game console that they had argued over, the teen told detectives.

"I was quiet the whole time," he said in the statement, read on the witness stand by homicide Detective Thorsten Lucke. "She was just breathing hard.

"I was tired of us arguing and I wanted it to be over," Anderson said later in the statement.

With his badly injured mother still breathing, he dragged her by her feet down the stairs to the kitchen, where he shoved her head and one shoulder into the hot oven, causing flesh to char.

"I was trying to get rid of her body, to cremate her," the statement, read by Lucke, said. "I wasn't sure it was hot enough."

Lucke said that Anderson told detectives that he left his mother in the kitchen for an hour and returned to see that she was still breathing. He said he then began beating her on the head with the leg of a kitchen chair. "I was thinking I couldn't believe what I did," he said in the statement. "I thought I was in too far, in too deep. I had to finish the job, sadly."

After she died, he dragged her body to the alley behind their Jackson Street home, wrapped it in a blanket and covered it, Bretschneider said.