A space rocket program manager brutally killed her father with an ice axe on Election Night after a breakdown following Donald Trump’s victory. Cops said 33-year-old Corey Burke was found clapping and smiling, covered in her father’s blood, according to New York Post.
Burke reportedly considered the attack to be an “act of liberation,” according to charging documents. She has been accused of strangling, biting and hacking her father, 67, to death in their $800,000 Seattle home.
According to Burke’s LinkedIn, she is a training program manager at Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’ spacecraft company. She is married to prominent transgender writer Samantha Leigh Allen, author of the acclaimed book Real Queer America: LGBT Stories from Red States, as well as an editor at Them, a Conde Nast transgender news publication. Burke told police that the murder was meant to “help people change their attachment to their parents” and “had to happen today.”
Burke had been upset about the election, and knew Trump would beat Kamala Harris. An already agitated Burke reportedly snapped when her dad, Timothy Burke, refused to switch the lights off.
Burke then went upstairs to bring an ice “pickaxe,” before tripping her father, biting and strangling him on the floor, and then repeatedly hitting him with the blunt and sharp ends of the tool, according to cops. She then sat down beside her father and watched him die, before smashing all the windows of the house “‘as an act of liberation,’” officers said. Cops arrived to find Burke “clapping … because she was so happy.”
Burke told cops that her relationship with her dad had been strained, and there were no strong “boundaries,” which has left her feeling “hyperfocused and disorganized.” She said it was Trump’s victory that “overwhelmed” her and pushed her to the breaking point.
When cops initially arrived at the scene, Burke stepped out of the house with her hands raised and face covered in blood. However, she said she did not know where the blood came from or who broke the windows.
Eventually, she described what happened, and whispered to one of the officers, “I killed him,” according to charging documents. She has been charged with first-degree murder, and is currently being held on a $2 million bail.