Murdered Florida mother posts emotional Taylor Swift lyrics hours before fatal stabbing involving her son

A Florida mother who police say was fatally stabbed by her 17-year-old son on Sunday posted lyrics from Taylor Swift’s song “It’s Time to Go” online in a poignant final message just hours before she was killed.

Catherine Griffith, 39, uploaded a picture of a secluded walkway leading into a forest captioned with the song’s lyrics the day before she was killed in the brutal stabbing attack in Auburndale.

Witnesses said she and her son, who reportedly has a history of mental health issues, got into an argument outside his grandmother’s home. He then dragged her by the hair into the residence, and she could be heard begging her son to “let me go,” the Polk County Sheriff’s Office said.

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That’s when Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd said at a news conference Wednesday that the 17-year-old “stabbed his mother in the neck so hard that the knife went right through her.” Judd later called the teen a “psychopath.” The teen told police that he and his mother got into a physical fight and that she fell on the knife.

The teen has been charged with first-degree murder, kidnapping and violating a restraining order. Judd is pushing to have him tried as an adult, but the local attorney general’s office told Fox News Digital it could not comment on the case until next week.

The fatal incident came 19 months after the teenager was charged with shooting his father in Oklahoma, although those charges were later dropped.

Griffith’s message perhaps suggests that she was not in a good place as she approached her death.

“That old familiar body ache, the snapping of the same little fractures in your soul,” Taylor Swift’s lyrics read. “You know when it’s time to go… Sometimes giving up is the strongest thing.”

Griffith’s Instagram page is filled with images of happier times with her son, including the two of them on a cruise, in front of the U.S. Capitol on July 4 and a photo of them with her son dressed in academic attire for his graduation.

Another image shows him sitting in the front of a 2024 Volkswagen Jetta, which Griffith said was an early graduation gift for his son.

But the relationship between the two men has apparently not always been rosy.

The teen’s grandmother, who was not present during the altercation, told WFLA that the teen had been verbally and physically confrontational with his mother on multiple occasions.

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Judd said that when investigators began to “peel back the layers of this onion,” they “[found] This is not an isolated incident. Last year, the teenager’s father also died from his injuries.

“On February 14, 2023, Valentine’s Day, in Lincoln County, Oklahoma, [he] “He said his father pulled a knife on him and he shot and killed his father,” Judd said. “He shot him once in the chest and once in the head, and he claimed self-defense.”

Oklahoma authorities dropped charges against the teen less than a month after the shooting because they could not disprove his “claim of self-defense,” Judd said.

The teen’s mother paid $50,000 to get him out of jail, the New York Post reported. He then moved into her home in Charlotte County, Florida, and was forcibly committed to a hospital for mental health reasons within a month.

At that time, Judd said, he made a threatening statement: “I’m going to kill myself or I’m going to kill my mother by shooting or stabbing her.”

In November 2023, the teenager “pushed [his mother] “He threw him to the ground and stomped on him” after she took away his video game privileges, Judd said. He was arrested and again claimed self-defense, but the argument failed this time, and he spent time behind bars, the sheriff said.

After another fight with his mother in February of this year, the teen ran away to his grandmother’s house in Auburndale. The teen’s mother and grandmother both contacted the sheriff’s office around that time and said they didn’t feel safe around him, Judd said, and at that time the teen was turned over to family services.

But despite further threats to kill his mother, the teenager was eventually reunited with his family two weeks later, despite further threats to kill his mother, Judd said.

According to the sheriff, the teenager became involved in “an argument over household chores” that led him to “run away from his mother’s house and [go to] “his grandmother’s house” on September 6. The suspect’s mother went to the grandmother’s house the next day, and that’s when she and the teenager had the altercation that cost her her life.

The teen initially told 911 dispatchers that his mother “fell under a knife” after a “very long fight” Sunday, Judd said.

Officers arriving in the Hamptons — a 55-and-older community in Auburndale about 50 miles east of Tampa, where the teen’s grandmother lives — found him “calm, cool, collected — and he had blood on him,” Judd said.

The 17-year-old reportedly became “uncooperative,” showed “no remorse” and had no sense of urgency toward his seriously injured mother.

“He looked the deputy in the eye and said, ‘I know my rights, I want a lawyer,'” Judd said.

Despite the teenager’s claims that he had had a long argument with his mother before her death, the house was “clean and tidy.” [with] “There is no evidence of any prolonged fighting,” Judd said.

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“When you look at that, you see a child,” Judd said. “When I look at him, I see a psychopath. I see completely erratic behavior to the point where at 17 he shot his father and got away with it, and stabbed his mother in the neck so hard the knife went right through her.”

“He’s now killed two people and killed his mother and father, and I can assure you – beyond reasonable doubt – that given his conduct, if he had gone to live with his grandmother at the end of this case and she had betrayed him, she would have been the next one to be prosecuted,” Judd added.

Judd said he would share with Oklahoma authorities any information uncovered in his department’s investigation that could incriminate the teen in his father’s death.