"John" COTTON - 5 yo (2003) - Abilene TX

When Milton Dwayne Gobert was a young boy, the now convicted killer
threatened to kill a cousin, told his grandmother to jump out a window and said
such nasty things that his mother thought he was possessed, according to court
testimony.
“I thought demons had gotten into my child,” his mother, Alice Gobert, told a
jury this morning.
Her testimony came during the fourth and likely final day the jury will hear
from witnesses in Gobert’s capital murder trial. Gobert was convicted of capital
murder last week, and the jury is expected to begin deliberating tomorrow
whether he should receive the death penalty.

Lawyers for Gobert called three of his family members to testify about his
childhood.
Alice Gobert testified that when her son was very young he could not go to
day care because he was so hyper and threw temper tantrums. She said that when
he was 5 he was hit by a vehicle while riding on a small “big wheel” near the
family’s home in Abilene and spent a month in the hospital. He was also in a
cast from the waist down, she said.
During his recovery he grew particularly nasty, according to his mother and a
cousin, Belinda Shavers, who helped cared for him at the time.
“He would call me a (expletive),” Shavers said. “He would say ‘(expletive)
you. I will kill you. Things like that.’”
Gobert’s brother and mother said that as Gobert grew older he got into many
fights, including some with family members.
He smashed his brother Michael Gobert with a trophy so hard once that Michael
Gobert needed stitches, his famly members said. His mother needed stitches after
Milton Gobert beat her with a broom when he was 15. He lashed out at teachers,
football teammates and others.
Gobert went into the custody of the juvenile system in his native Abilene for
the earlier incidents several times, his mother said, but eventually returned no
better than before.
“It was always bringing him back to me,” Alice Gobert said. “I didn’t know
what to do.”
She said that after Gobert was arrested for robbery and got probation when he
was 19, he cut her with a knife in a confrontation.
Gobert had asked his mother to lie about that confrontation in preparation
for his trial in Travis County, she said.
She said she told her son that she would not do that.
Gobert, 37, faces life in prison or death in the October 2003 stabbing death
of Mel Kernena Cotton, 30, in her North Austin apartment. Cotton’s then
5-year-old son was also stabbed and choked in the attack but survived.