The state rested its case at 2:50 p.m. Friday after four days of testimony in the Mason Sisk capital murder trial. The defense is expected to present its case when Circuit Court Judge Chadwick Wise convenes testimony in his courtroom Monday at 8:30 a.m.

Friday morning’s testimony was marked by the playing of a Sheriff’s Department video of Sisk’s Sept. 3, 2019, interrogation and confession.

The Confession

“I got fed up with it,” said Mason Sisk. “The kids were going through a lot. All the arguing, Dad walking out. Yeah, I killed them.”

Jurors and spectators sat spellbound as a video rolled and the then 14-year-old Sisk talked to former Limestone County sheriff Mike Blakely and Investigator Lt. Johnny Morell in the early morning hours. They asked Mason why he shot to death his stepmother, Mary Sisk; his father, John Wayne “Dub” Sisk; his brother, Grayson “Kane” Sisk, 6; his sister, Aurora “Rorrie” Sisk, 4; and his brother, Colson Sisk, 6 months; a few hours before, late on Sept. 2, in their Elkmont home.

Early in the interview held in the interrogation room of the Limestone County Jail, Mason stuck to his story of a fleeing intruder having shot his five family members in their sleep. But soon, his account started breaking down.

“That’s bulls*** what you’re saying, Mason,” Blakely was heard saying on the video. “We’ll see where the gun is and we’ll see that you get help. If we have to get the whole National Guard out there, we’ll find that gun.”

At first, Mason told the sheriff and investigator that after hearing the shots and coming up from his basement bedroom, he didn’t go into his parents’ and siblings’ bedrooms to check on them before calling 911 and reporting that “all of [his] family were shot to death.”

“How did you know they were killed?” asked Blakely.

“It was just an assumption,” said Mason.

“You knew all five had been killed without going back to check on them?” asked Blakely.

And why, Blakely wanted to know, did Mason call his girlfriend, Lola Holladay, four times before calling 911.

“Something happened and I freaked and didn’t know what to do,” said Mason. “Lola told me to call 911 and report it.”

‘Dragged by evil’

In a rare evening session of testimony Thursday, Lola Holladay said Mason called her and wanted to come to her house in Huntsville, but she told him she wasn’t at home, but visiting a friend in Gurley.

“He was crying and he told me they were all dead,” said Holladay. “He said he heard gunshots, went up the stairs and saw tail lights leaving the driveway. He said he wanted to go to my house because he didn’t want to stay there with them. I told him not to leave because they would think he did it. He should call the cops and tell them what happened.

“I called my Mom and she said to call him back and tell him to call the police and that’s what I did. I told him to park at the end of the driveway and I didn’t hear from him after that.”

She said that Blakely called her at about 1 a.m. and asked her if Mason had any firearms in the house or if Mason owned any firearms. I told him he had a BB-gun, but it was jammed, and he had a long gun that was also broken.

“After a while of not hearing from him, Mason called and said he was okay and he was going to be okay and he loved me.”

Subsequently, while Mason was being held in solitary confinement he signed a contract for a “Chirp” messenger device in the jail that allowed him to send texts at 10 cents a message.

In one of those texts, which was entered as an exhibit, Mason tells Holladay that he was “held at gunpoint and forced to kill his family under threat of being killed himself and the remainder of his (extended) family also killed.”

In a Feb. 18, 2019, text to her, Mason tells her that he wants to become a “contract assassin.”

As Lola read Mason’s text aloud from the monitor, he wrote: “When I did what I did I found something that I’m good at.” She exclaims, “No!” Mason sent a following message saying, “I killed my whole family in less than 4 seconds.” He goes on to say that he feels that he is being “dragged by evil.”

Another of Mason’s acquaintances with whom he traded texts, Catlin Brunocci, also said he told her he wanted to be a “contract assassin.”

‘Family issues’

Blakely also asked Holladay about abuse Mason might have suffered in his home in the past. When he’d asked Mason in the interrogation about his father abusing him, Mason answered that, “I don’t like to talk to people about our family issues” but he said he has discussed those issues “off and on” with some.

“Every Friday night my dad would come home drunk and pissed off,” said Mason. “Sometimes he would hit Mama. She would tell him to stop drinking and she’d go cry in her bedroom. Then they started going to counseling, but that only lasted six months and he found every way to blame Mama. I was holding Kane on the couch. She started yelling, ‘Look what you’re doing to the children.”

Mason’s girlfriend, Lola Holladay, told about witnessing an incident of abuse when she and her mother visited the Sisk home. John Sisk was employed as a recreational vehicle repairman with a Decatur company, but sometime in his past he had been trained as a cosmetologist. Holladay and her mother visited the Sisk home for John for a haircut.

“John said something about, Mason wasn’t going to act up in front of his girlfriend and her mother,” said Holladay. “He grabbed Mason between the legs. Mason fell down on the ground and begged for him to stop.”

She told of another incident in which John dragged Mason out of the car and struck him in the backs of the legs. She said she also witnessed another incident over FaceTime.

“Mason was in the basement folding laundry and he went upstairs,” she said. “When he came down, he was holding a rag over his nose because it was bleeding.”

After these repeated incidents, Holladay said her family was “uncomfortable” visiting the Sisks and she was not allowed to “go back over there.”

She said that Mason was fond of his younger siblings and often babysat them. He called Aurora “Rorrie,” his “Little Princess.”

Mason met both Holladay and Catlin Brunocci when they attended Madison County Middle School together. Mason and Holladay became boyfriend and girlfriend and traded texts and phone calls and sometimes visits at a mutual friend’s home.

‘All of them’

Mason said in the interrogation video that when his “Uncle Gator” — John Matt “Gator” Patty — called to invite the family to their Gulf Breeze, Fla., home over Labor Day weekend 2019, his dad, “jumped at the chance” because he always wanted to live in Florida.

The family of six then visited Gator and his wife, Angela, that weekend. Gator said that John was abnormally quiet that weekend and Angela said there was tension in the air. When the Sisks packed their car to head home on Monday, Sept. 2, Gator discovered that his Smith & Wesson 9mm pistol was missing from his nightstand.

John brought his family’s luggage back out from the car and searched them, but the search did not turn up the gun, according to Gator’s testimony.

The gun was eventually traced to the murders through ballistic tests on spent shell casing from the murder scene, according to a state forensic expert, who testified Thursday.

“Tell me exactly what your family did that day,” said Blakely in the video. “Did your family talk on their way home from Florida. You say you got home about 8:10…Were you arguing all the way home?” Mason said he didn’t listen closely because he had earbuds in.

“I was mad when we came back,” said Mason. “I knocked a hole in the basement wall. I could still hear thumping upstairs. I sat at my desk and thought I didn’t want the kids to grow up hearing that.”

Mason said during the interrogation his stepmother, Mary Sisk, could at times be “annoying.”

“She grew up in the city and she was all about that manners crap,” he said. “She does it to where it’s annoying. She’s way too hard on the kids and me.”

Mason said he remained in the basement for a time playing a video game, “Need for Speed,” while his stepmother went to bed early because she had to get up by 4 a.m. for her teaching job in Huntsville. He said his Dad usually got up the same time as the children did to get ready for school in Elkmont.

“I was playing when I heard five shots and had to go upstairs. I stumbled on the fifth step and then I heard footsteps and someone going out the front door.”

“He said he went to his parents’ room and saw blood on their faces and ran out and saw tail lights going out of the driveway.”

“Was it your intention to shoot just your Mom and Dad?” asked Blakely.

“No, all of them,” answered Sisk.

The video showed conversation about how Sisk had been briefly hospitalized in Decatur General West, a psychiatric facility, a year before the shootings because he had mentioned suicide to a friend and he was deemed to have “control issues.” He said he was given “little pink pills,” which made him feel “some better.”

Mason was not read his Juvenile Miranda Rights until 32 minutes into the interrogation. Previous to that, he was questioned as a “witness to a homicide.”

Eventually, after his confession, Mason told Blakely and Morell where he discarded the gun. The three went to the location on Sandlin Road, about a mile east of the Sisks’ Ridge Road home. They couldn’t locate the gun, but several hours later, Investigator Leslie Ramsey, Captain Lance Royals and firearms expert Jamie King, who was then with the Sheriff’s Department, located the gun in a ditch several feet off the road.