74-year-old mom shot in face while in recliner, MN cops say. ‘I killed my mother’

A man is accused of fatally shooting his 74-year-old mother as she slept on a recliner, Minnesota authorities say.

“There went my life,” Nathan Douglas Davin, 46, said while being taken into custody Aug. 16 in Duluth, according to court filings.

He is charged with second-degree murder in the death of his mother, MaeDean Davin, a “sassy grandma” who retired from teaching in 2021, according to court documents and social media posts.

Nathan Davin was wearing only boxers when he knocked on the door of his neighbor’s home, telling a person who answered the door that there had been a death, authorities said in a statement of probable cause.

“Why is there blood on your hands?” officers asked him when they responded to the home, according to the court documents.

He initially told officers he found his mother dead, investigators said.

“When officers looked inside the home, they saw a woman … sitting in a recliner in the living room,” a Duluth police officer wrote in the statement of probable cause. “Officers observed a devastating gunshot wound to her face. A significant amount of blood was on victim’s shirt and the recliner.”

Investigators said they found ammo in the son’s room that matched those located in a pistol found at the crime scene.

An investigation revealed he shot his mom while she was sleeping in the recliner, causing a “devastating gunshot wound,” according to court filings.

The wound, authorities said, was the size of a baseball and exposed part of her brain. Her head was also caved in, a sign she suffered from blunt force trauma, according to the investigators.

“I killed my mother,” Nathan Davin was overheard saying while sitting alone in an interview room, police said.

Nathan Davin was jailed on a $750,000 bond, officials said.

MaeDean Davin taught for three years at Summit School in Duluth, where she retired in 2021. The school said it was “shocked and saddened” about her death.

“Those of us that knew MaeDean were lucky to work with her here at Summit and get to know the sassy grandma that she loved to be,” the school said.

According to a GoFundMe, she was a “devoted grandmother” who “touched countless lives with her kindness, wisdom and unwavering friendship.”

Duluth is about a 155-mile drive northeast from Minneapolis.

This story was originally published August 20, 2025 at 3:56 PM with the headline "74-year-old mom shot in face while in recliner, MN cops say. ‘I killed my mother’."