It was a hot summer Sunday morning, and Ellen was busy making calls to family members about her uncle’s death.
At around 10:30 a.m. on Sept. 1, 2019, after attempting to reach her mother several times to deliver the news, she decided to rip the band-aid and inform her 33-year-old half-brother, David Sumney. To her surprise, Sumney said he was at their mother Margaret’s house in South Fayette, Pennsylvania—even though he had moved to another town and had been accused of assaulting the petite 67-year-old matriarch numerous times.
“My first thought was, ‘Well that’s strange,’” Ellen, who asked to only be identified by her first name out of concern for her children, told The Daily Beast. “So I said, ‘Can you put her on the phone?’ And he said she is asleep. And I didn’t think about it too much then, but then I called a couple of hours later—still asleep. And then a couple of hours after that—still asleep, still asleep.”
“It got to a point where I called him and I said, ‘If she is still asleep, maybe she needs to go to the hospital, maybe something is wrong with her.’ Nobody could possibly sleep this long, right?”
Later, Ellen would learn that her 6-foot-4 half-brother had already murdered their mother and shoved her body inside a bathtub at the time of their conversations. Sumney even documented the horrific scene, taking 277 photos that included his mother’s swollen face, unconscious body, and several selfies with blood on his own face. The Allegheny County Medical Examiner's Office concluded that Margaret had lacerations on her face and contusions on her body. She had multiple fractured ribs and a spinal fracture that would have paralyzed her from the waist down.
“To take 277 photos of murdering her, he had to enjoy it,” Ellen said. “He even took a photo with her blood smeared on his face giving a thumbs up. Maybe they were a trophy for him.”
Sumney was arrested a few days later outside of his uncle’s funeral, where police discovered him with a diamond gold necklace, a silver bracelet, three blank checks in his mother’s name, and her debit card. Eventually, authorities charged Sumney with multiple crimes, including first-degree murder, abuse of a corpse, theft, and robbery.
But just three months after Sumney’s arrest, the Allegheny County District Attorney's Office floated the idea of a plea deal—which Ellen said her family immediately rejected. Three years and one pandemic later, Ellen said their fears that her brother was dodging a full-scale prosecution came true when Sumney pleaded guilty to third-degree murder in connection with his mother’s death last month.
Sumney’s Aug. 17, 2022, plea in front of Allegheny County Common Pleas Court Judge Edward Borkowski meant that all the other charges against him were dropped, and he now faces a maximum sentence of 40 years behind bars.
Margaret Sumney and David Sumney.
Ann ShadeDuring the hearing, according to the Post Gazette, Assistant District Attorney Michael Pradines said that only one family member was “in vocal disagreement” with the plea and stressed that the rest of Margaret’s family saw the third-degree murder agreement as the end of a “three-year nightmare.” In reality, Ellen said, only one family member gave the district attorney consent to the agreement. Margaret’s sister, Ann Shade, told The Daily Beast that during the hearing, she herself audibly said “no” as Pradines claimed family support, going so far as to shake her head violently.
The plea agreement, according to multiple family members who spoke to The Daily Beast, has served only to renew their fear of retaliation if and when Sumney is released from prison. But it also enraged his ex-girlfriend, who is at the center of a separate criminal case in Atlantic City, where Sumney is accused of waterboarding and strangling her in a hotel room before she was able to escape.
The incident came just six weeks before Margaret’s murder.
“He is constantly slipping through the cracks of the judicial system,” Sumney’s ex-girlfriend, who spoke under the condition of anonymity, told The Daily Beast. “I have no doubt that if he is about to enter society again, he will try to kill someone else.”
Neither the Allegheny County District Attorney’s Office nor Sumney’s lawyers responded to requests for comment. The family member who other relatives said backed the plea deal also did not respond to comment.
Now, Sumney’s family says their last chance for justice—and to ease their fears they may be his next victims—is that Judge Borowski throws out the plea agreement ahead of the 33-year-old’s Nov. 17 sentencing hearing.
“All we want is a fair trial. We just want David to pay for what he has done,” Shade, Sumney’s aunt, told The Daily Beast. “My family just wants to feel safe.”
The first time Ellen knew something was wrong with her brother was when he was 5 years old.
Although she is 15 years older than Sumney, she did spend a few years living in the same house before she headed off to college—and would see him during her summer vacations. During one of those breaks, Ellen said, she was upstairs in her room when her mother started “screaming at the top of her lungs.”
“David had a friend over and somehow—and they were just 5 years old—they just killed a bird,” Ellen said. “And my mom was screaming, ‘This is what serial murderers do.’ Like screaming while I was trying to wrap my head around how he could kill a baby bird.”
The 48-year-old said she has since realized that Sumney’s childhood offered premonitions about the violence he was later accused of inflicting on his parents and others.
Margaret Sumney.
Ann ShadeCourt documents and arrest records obtained by The Daily Beast show that Sumney’s first run-in with the law was in April 2011, when he was arrested for driving under the influence in Arlington, Virginia. Three years later, in June 2014, Sumney was arrested for harassment. Two months after that, he was charged with assaulting his mother.
In June 2015, Sumney was charged with aggravated assault, public drunkenness, disorderly conduct, and harassment for allegedly beating up his 71-year-old father, David Lee Sumney Sr. According to a 2015 article in the Observer-Reporter, Sumney Sr. told police the altercation began when the two began to argue over a vacation schedule. Suddenly, he told police, Sumney pinned him against his front door and started hitting him.
A year later, in November 2016, Sumney was again charged with assaulting his mother. In a criminal complaint obtained by The Daily Beast, Margaret Sumney told authorities her son “violently assaulted her” after consuming “a lot of alcohol.” Sumney’s mother said that he “kicked her and grabbed her by the neck area,” the complaint states, noting that he also “picked her up around the chest area and squeezed her, causing severe pain below her breast area ‘while he stated this is how we do it in the Navy Seals.’” (A Navy spokesperson said there was no record of Sumney in their system.)
In a handwritten request for temporary protection from abuse order, the mother said Sumney punched her in the face and body and choked her. During the violent attack, Sumney then allegedly said, “I’ll get you next time” before his mother was able to run to a neighbor's house to call authorities.
Sumney was never convicted of a felony. In various cases, the charges against him were either downgraded or he pleaded to misdemeanors. (Some of the relevant court documents about Sumney’s various charges remain under seal.) Ultimately, Sumney never received more than eight months in confinement and probation.
Ann Shade, Margaret’s sister, said that one reason that Sumney would get away with violent crimes was his mother’s ultimate pleas for leniency. “It was almost as if she was a battered wife,” Shade said. “With all the times he ended up in court, he should have already been in jail for a while.”
But at one point, after countless instances of alleged abuse, Shade said, her sister—Sumney’s mother—decided to buy a gun to protect herself.
“My brother said, ‘Don’t do that, you’ll kill yourself,” Shade said about the gun. “But [Margaret] was afraid about what he would do.”
Unbeknownst to his mother’s family, Sumney escaping major legal repercussions may have provided him the opportunity to unleash his violent behavior on outsiders.
In August 2018, Sumney met his ex-girlfriend online. She told The Daily Beast that she never “had any inclination that anything was off about him,” and attributed his sometimes-cold or closed-off demeanor to his supposed Navy SEAL training.
“I actually met his mom and she also told me that he was a SEAL,” the ex-girlfriend said. “He must have read the book on how to be a Navy SEAL. He just had this demeanor, like he could overcome anything. He also showed me these photos of what looked like him in the desert. I now know that wasn’t him.”
After being on and off for several months, the ex-girlfriend said the decision to take a five-day beach vacation to Atlantic City in July 2019 was “partly to see if this was going to work.” But it didn’t take long for the trip to turn ugly, she said.
“The first time he physically hit me was in the hotel room,” the ex-girlfriend said. “I was like, holy shit, and my mind just went into survival mode, just figuring out ways to keep the situation calm to avoid getting hurt again. Just keep everything cool, calm, and collected.”
Days later, she said, Sumney became irate again—and started torturing her in their hotel room. Sumney choked her until she passed out, punched her in the face, and eventually waterboarded her in the bathroom, she said.
“He just kept saying things like, ‘How do you want your body to be found? In the bathroom from an overdose or would you like for your body to just disappear?’” the ex-girlfriend said. Eventually, a bellhop knocked on their hotel room after they failed the check out of their room on July 16, 2019—providing her with an opportunity to escape.
Fearing for her life, she said, she ran into a nearby room and slammed the door shut before she started to scream, “He’s gonna kill me, he’s gonna kill me.”
While local authorities were immediately called and an arrest warrant was obtained for Sumney, the 32-year-old was able to evade authorities. One main reason, the ex-girlfriend and Sumney’s family said, was that he was not entered into the National Crime Information Center. Simply put, once Sumney left New Jersey, authorities in other states had no idea he was a wanted man.
The Atlantic City Police Department did not respond to a request for comment. But Sumney was charged in 2020 with several crimes in connection with the episode—including aggravated assault, terroristic threats for threatening immediate death, and criminal restraint—for the alleged attack on his ex-girlfriend. Sumney has yet to enter a plea on these charges, and it was not clear if he had an attorney on the case.
Sumney’s family said police allowed him to fly from New Jersey to Denver before eventually returning to Pennsylvania. Weeks later, on August 24, Sumney was given a citation just outside of Pittsburgh after allegedly punching a Lyft driver when he got lost on their ride.
“There were so many instances for David to be stopped in 2019 alone. And yet he was able to slip through the cracks—again,” Ellen said. “He is a Ted Bundy-type, you know. He is manipulative and charismatic and is able to manipulate people. He is also a sociopath who is capable of murder.”
Less than a week after allegedly attacking the Lyft driver, prosecutors say, Sumney brutally attacked his mother. In a 2019 criminal complaint, authorities described the grisly scene he left behind at her house.
The complaint states that police entered the home on Sept. 2 after relatives called authorities multiple times to check on Margaret. During one call, a relative stated that Sumney was “altered” and that he claimed their mother “has been sleeping for two days.”
Officers found the Olde Orchard Drive home soaked in blood with apparent signs of a struggle—and Margaret in the upstairs bathtub. In the downstairs foyer, police found three trash bags with several gloves, a nearly empty bottle of “Giant Eagle Clean Promise” ammonia, a bottle of bleach, a roll of masking tape, and several towels with blood stains. In the living room, splatter was found on the ceiling above the blood-stained white sofa that was covered with a red bathrobe, a beach towel, and pillows, the complaint states.
Margaret Sumney and David Sumney.
Ann Shade“Upon moving the ottoman away from the sofa, multiple areas of red/brown staining, both drops and smears, were observed,” the complaint states, noting that glass was all over the floor. The complaint also notes that there appeared to be feces on the floor.
Ellen said that authorities later explained to her that Sumney must have had to break their mother’s entire back to position her body the way it was found in the bathtub. She added that when she called Sumney on Sept. 2 after learning the news about their mother’s death, he simply responded: “I don’t want to give you the wrong answer.”
“I said there is not a right or wrong answer, and he said ‘Ellen, I don’t want to give you a wrong answer,’” she added.
When authorities arrested Sumney, they learned that he had checked into a local hotel after the murder and paid for three nights. The complaint states that the hotel manager told police that on Sumney’s second day, he “stopped her in the lobby and gave her a set of pearls” before saying, “from a special lady to a special lady.”
Inside the hotel room, investigators found a slew of Margaret’s belongings—including the revolver she had purchased to protect herself against her son. Investigators then went through his cellphone, where they discovered hundreds of photographs he had taken of the aftermath of his crime.
Prosecutors also revealed in a court hearing that Sumney looked up several questions on how to handle his mom’s body, including, “How long does it take before a body starts to decompose?” and “How long do you wait to dispose of a body?”
“Knowing he took photos of her makes my skin crawl,” Shade told The Daily Beast.
For most members of the family, the details of the case should have been enough to make sure Sumney stayed in prison for the rest of his life. Instead, Ellen and Shade were shocked to see an email from Assistant District Attorney Michael Pradines at 3:56 p.m. on Aug. 11 informing them a plea agreement had been reached with Sumney’s attorneys.
“This has been a long and hard road,” Pradines wrote in the email, which was reviewed by The Daily Beast. “You and your family are always in my thoughts.” About 20 minutes later, Ellen responded to express her anger over the plea deal, stressing that “this is not justice for my mom or keeping Pennsylvania safe.”
“Once again, David won in the Pennsylvania criminal justice system,” Ellen wrote in her response. “I fear for my family & David’s next victims when he is out. This also speaks loudly that Pennsylvania does not take domestic violence seriously.”
Three days later, Pradines sent a response email—not responding to Ellen’s concerns and simply stating that Sumney will “enter a plea of guilty” on Aug. 17 before apologizing “about the late notice.”
“The plea hearing proved what Ellen had written in her email,” her aunt, Ann Shade, said to The Daily Beast. “They overlooked the facts of the case and allowed him to plead guilty to a lesser crime. Our only hope is that the judge sees him for how dangerous he is and overturns it before it is too late.”
