Wearing a blue polo shirt and khakis, the teenager stood between his lawyers with his ankles shackled and his hands clasped behind his back. He politely answered the judge's questions about whether he understood the rights he gave up by pleading guilty and whether he had been threatened or promised anything to get him to do so.
"Beyond the plea agreement? No sir," Browning responded.
He began to cry as the prosecutor read the two-page statement of facts to which both sides had agreed as part of the plea negotiations.
Brobst told the judge that Browning's parents dropped him off at a friend's house at 6 p.m. Feb. 1 with plans to pick him up the next morning for a "family cleaning day" at his home. But Browning - a week shy of his 16th birthday - told his friends that he intended to return home that night to take his family's Ford Expedition so they could joy ride. He asked his brother Greg to leave the basement door unlocked so he could take the keys to the SUV, the prosecutor said.
After walking home, Browning went to the basement, where his father had been cleaning a 9 mm pistol. He pulled on his father's gloves, picked up the gun and a spare magazine, and walked upstairs.
There, in the family room, Browning found his father asleep on the couch. "The defendant raised the pistol and shot his father in the head, killing him," Brobst said.
Expecting his family to be awakened by the gunfire, the teenager then waited beside his father for the others to come downstairs, she said. When they did not, he went to the second-floor bedrooms.
He shot his mother twice while she lay in her bed before continuing down the hall to the bedroom where his brothers slept. There, he shot Greg once in the head, Brobst said.
"Benjamin began to stir and the defendant raised the pistol yet again," the prosecutor told the judge. "He shot Benjamin twice in the face. One of the bullets grazed Benjamin's left index finger as he put his hand over his face prior to being shot. ... The defendant turned and walked away from the room and the wallpaper border that was now splattered with the blood of his brothers."
In the hours that followed the killings, Browning played video games and went to the mall with his friends. He repeatedly called home, his family's cell phones and their vacation home on Deep Creek Lake, telling his parents and brothers in each message that he loved them and would see them soon, Brobst said.
