GATESVILLE - Sixteen-year-old Jamie Grant was sentenced to 45 years in prison Monday, a year and 10 days after he participated in the murder of his father, Michael Grant.

“I’m giving you five years off the maximum because of your youth at the time,” said Judge Phillip Zeigler of 52nd State District Court. “I have not seen remorse and do not believe there has been remorse and that is why I am in the higher end of the sentence.”

A plea agreement was accepted in the courtroom Monday morning just before Grant’s murder trial was set to begin. Grant agreed to plead guilty but his sentence was capped at 50 years.

Minutes after the verdict, Michael Grant’s sister and daughter stood before Grant and gave victim impact statements.

“I pray that you’ll be able to shed a tear someday for somebody other than yourself,” Kathy Grant, his sister, said through tears.

Grant made a point of appearing not to listen to family members as they attempted to directly address him. He did not look at them and spoke animatedly to his attorney the entire time.

As he left the courtroom, Grant angrily said something that was not audible to everybody in the courtroom. A family member said his words were a threat: “I hate you. I’ll get you.”

If those were his words, they did not appear to address anybody in particular as he was looking at a closed door.

Such bizarre behavior is in line with virtually every testimony from the two-day hearing with the exception of a few of his maternal relatives and a youth counselor who met with Grant regularly in Coryell County Jail.

Michael Duncan, a Waco librarian and Grant’s great-uncle, described Grant as compassionate and kind.

“He has treated our family with such respect,” he said. “Since the day he was born, he was special to me. He is not bad. He’s just a boy.”

Another relative, Audrey Freeman, Grant’s great-aunt, described him as a good Christian boy.

“He’s compassionate,” she said. “He’s always been loving, considerate of others - these are his best qualities.”

“I do not think they know the true Jamie Grant,” said District Attorney David Castillo in his closing arguments.

Testimony in his hearing indicated Grant has been emotionally disturbed from a young age and was taking antipsychotic drugs before he was a teenager.

At 4 years old, he had trouble adjusting to preschool and having a new sibling - a sister - in the family. Grant would yell at the 2-month-old and tell her to shut up and that he hated her.

His therapist Janet Luedeker of Waco said Grant was still wearing diapers to bed and drinking from a bottle at 4 years old.

When she first began seeing Grant, he would play with dolls and have boulders fall on them and kill them or have dinosaurs eat them.

As he aged, his intensity and aggression became more creative and disturbing. He would pretend he was killing the dolls with acid or giving them shots in the genital areas. In school he stabbed himself and others with pencils and once pulled hair out of a girl’s head and licked it.

He spoke of killing both parents as early as 2002, when he was 10 years old, Ms. Luedeker said.

By 2003 Luedeker told the family they should seek help from another psychologist because she was not able to make progress with him.

“I felt like it might be helpful if he found a male therapist,” she said. “The females in his family were very powerful. At that point I felt like he needed to see someone else.”

Grant’s mother, Megan Lewis, and her former live-in boyfriend, John Hopkins, both face capital murder charges in connection with the murder. Six weeks after the crime, Hopkins confessed to stabbing Michael Grant after the younger Grant let him into the house. Hopkins said he did it out of love for Ms. Lewis.

Officers who responded to the crime scene in September 2007 reported smelling someone burning something in the neighborhood. They now believe it was Ms. Lewis burning the clothes her son and boyfriend wore when they killed her ex-husband.

Castillo refused to make any comments because the cases of Hopkins and Ms. Lewis are still pending.

Bobby Barina, Grant’s attorney, said he believes Ms. Lewis is more culpable than his client because she is a trained nurse who brought her mentally ill son together with Hopkins, an ex-con who has been diagnosed to be bipolar.

“She could have been a witness for her son but she chose not to,” Barina said about an earlier hearing in the case. “She invoked her Fifth Amendment right - right in front of him. There was that one opportunity to be there for her son but she chose not to.”

Michael Grant and Ms. Lewis were involved in a contentious divorce in which Michael Grant was awarded custody and Ms. Lewis was awarded visitation.

The decision, made by a jury, angered Grant, who did not want to live with his father. Michael Grant provided more structure and established clearer boundaries than did the mother, according to testimony from the hearing.

Eric Marsh, a former friend of Grant’s, said he spent time playing video games and smoking marijuana with him the day after his father died.

Marsh said at one point he, Grant and Hopkins went to a home to purchase some marijuana. Hopkins frightened those at the house when he bragged about being an ex-con and pulled a 9mm handgun from his waistband and placed it on a bed.

Hopkins later told police it was a gun he stole from Michael Grant before he stabbed him to death.

A week before Grant was arrested for murder, Marsh said he asked Grant if he had killed his father.

He said Grant responded with stabbing gestures and said he would never forget how it sounded.

Michael Grant had as many as seven stab wounds in his body when officers found it on the side of Greenbriar Road.

“This case is a tragedy both because the loss of a family member who was murdered and a family member who committed the murder,” Zeigler said.