He remembers that whenever his father was cross with him, his father always thought Sheppard was smirking, and as a boy he had trouble telling his father how he felt.
But in contemporary society, we have trouble talking about the obvious: The transition from boy to man is a risky endeavor, and there can be a lot of collateral damage.
The boy had also told police he did not expect to get in trouble because he had seen an episode of the television show Criminal Minds in which a child killed an abusive father and was not arrested.