Roger Ybanez lost both his wife and son when Nathan Ybanez killed his mother in 1998.

"It's an absolutely awful thing," Roger Ybanez said. "It's real difficult. I'm on both sides of it."



"At first I was so distraught and so angry about the whole thing, I didn't know what to think," said Roger Ybanez, who remarried and moved to Texas after the murder.

"But as the days progressed, my main goal was to do whatever I could do to help Nathan out."

Roger Ybanez wouldn't discuss his son's claims of sexual and severe physical abuse by both parents, which didn't come out at trial and are the basis for his appeal.

"I think they're trying to ride the wrong horse to the race here," he said.

But he says Colorado's system of allowing juveniles to be tried as adults and requiring life without parole for first-degree murder is wrong.

"I just don't think that juveniles should be tried as adults, and the sentencing is way too one-sided. There's no flexibility for juveniles," he said.

"I'm not here to tell you that a juvenile shouldn't be punished for a class 1 felony. I think that they should be. But what is enough? Right now, the kid's been in a jail cell for half of his life."

He said teenagers can't participate meaningfully in their defense.

"I don't think that the adult court protects their rights," he said.

"I really think that juveniles are incapacitated to some extent in how they can help themselves (in a criminal case). A teenager's perception of the world is so different. They really don't understand the system and what the consequences will be on the rest of their life if they don't participate."

Nathan Ybanez didn't cooperate with his attorney in forming a defense strategy, his father said.

"He was not talking to anyone. He was not talking to me or anyone else about how it happened or why," Roger Ybanez said.

"People more qualified than me should decide what the appropriate sentence is, but there needs to be some type of punishment and rehabilitation," Roger Ybanez said. "In prison, there is not much of that. It's basically just a holding pen for people who committed crimes."

He said there should be options between a juvenile sentence and an adult life sentence.

"Now it's either a get-out-of-jail free card on one side and the most horrendous possible sentence on the other. Judges are not given any middle ground," he said.

Roger Ybanez said he never dreamed he would be in a place to contemplate such issues.

"I thought we had a great relationship between the three of us," he said. "We were not any different from any other middle-class family. We went to the mountains, went skiing.

"Nathan played basketball, and we went to all of his games. Then in a 12-month period we went from the middle of paradise to like Katrina. What in the world happened?

"Everyone thinks things like this never will happen to me. But it can."