PHILADELPHIA

A 14-year-old girl admitted in Family Court yesterday to setting a fire last year in her Oxford Circle home that killed her police-officer father.
"She said she was trying to commit suicide," Assistant District Attorney Jacqueline Juli-ano Coelho said after the hearing.

The girl, Brittany Talington, had told police that she and her father had argued the night before the blaze and that she "couldn't take it no more."

She told Judge Abram Frank Reynolds that she did not know that her father, Tyrone Talington, 32, was in the house at the time.

The judge ruled Talington delinquent on the charges to which she admitted guilt - second-degree murder and arson - and ordered her sent to the Pines Residential Treatment Center in Virginia, a rehabilitative facility for juveniles. She will stay there as long as Reynolds deems fit. She can be supervised by the juvenile-court system until she's 21.

Talington was 12 the day she set ablaze the rowhouse she shared with her father on Loretto Avenue near Comly Street. Her case - as is done in all murder cases, regardless of the defendant's age - was first sent to adult court.

Her attorney, Jack McMahon, argued successfully for Talington to be tried as a juvenile at a July 9 decertification hearing before Common Pleas Judge Benjamin Lerner. McMahon said after that hearing that his client needs treatment, not to be locked behind bars for an "impulsive, stupid decision."

Authorities had contended that Talington knew that her father was home when she set the house on fire about 4:30 a.m. on March 19, 2006. She left with her cat in her arms and her father asleep inside, they said.

However, Talington, in her own statements, and her attorney said that she had not known that her father was at home.

"It was an accident," McMahon said after the hearing. He said his client's admission to second-degree murder showed that "she had no intention to kill her father." Second-degree murder is a homicide committed in the act of another felony - in this case, arson.

In her statement to police, read in court at her preliminary hearing last year, Talington confessed to having started two fires in her home. She said she had thought her father was at work.

Tyrone Talington, a nine-year police veteran, most recently served as an officer in the 14th District, in Germantown.

Brittany Talington had told police that her conflict with her father had begun the night before the fire.

She said in her statement that her father "cussed at me" because she had traded her cell phone to another kid.

"I was angry and mad," she said in the statement. "I wanted to hurt myself. I couldn't take it no more. My dad said I couldn't see my mom no more and that I couldn't go over to my grandmother's no more."

Brittany Talington's parents lived apart.

Authorities have said that Tyrone Talington searched his burning home looking for his daughter, unaware that she had started the blaze and had already fled. His body was found in the dining room. *

This is another case of a spoiled bratt that wasn't getting what she wanted and instead said, "I'm going to kill myselt", but then changes her mind after she started the ball rolling. If she thought she had a reason then for committ suicide what's she thinking now that she killed her father. I'm sorry, but I have no sympathy for kids like this that throw the suicide comment like it was nothing just to get attention.

Which is more tragic: that the daughter survived, or that the dad died searching the house for the daughter who killed him?
Rowhouses aren't that big ~ it's difficult to share one without knowing exactly where the other person is, so I have a difficult time giving any credence to her story or sympathy to her plight. I've made "stupid, impulsive decisions" before that landed me in hot water, but they weren't criminal and nobody died or had their home burned down around them. I will never be surprised at how low an attorney will stoop (most spend their time in the dirt, anyway), but I hope nojury will accept this brazen attempt to let her off with "treatment"...

Rowhouses are attached to other houses-- even supposing she thought HE wasn't home, what did she think might be going on in the houses attached to hers? There could be people, animals, there. And even if the other houses were empty, who was she, to destroy the homes of others?

This is sad, he helped to bring her into this world and she coldly took him out of it.