<p>A teen's surprise confession this week in the 2004 strangulation of an 8-year-old neighbor girl was good news to the family of the 14-year-old boy who is serving a sentence in a youth detention center for the killing, but authorities are skeptical.</p><p>"This is the best news the family has heard in two years," attorney Gerald Word said Friday.</p><p>Investigators are handling the confession carefully because, they say, the 18-year-old who turned himself in has mental disabilities, and there appear to be inconsistencies in his story.</p><p>Carroll County Sheriff's Chief Deputy Brad Robinson said the boy's mental capacity appears to be "limited." District Attorney Pete Skandalakis added, "Investigators described him as mentally handicapped, almost like he was functioning like a 9-year-old."</p><p>Robinson also said that much of what the 18-year-old said consisted of information already published in media reports, and some of it was inconsistent with what investigators know to be the facts.</p><p>The older teen has not been charged with a crime and is not in custody. Neither he nor the youth who was sentenced in the case last year have been publicly identified.</p><p>Robinson said the 18-year-old, accompanied by his father, showed up at the Carroll County Sheriff's Department Monday.</p><p>"After a religious conversion, the boy needed to confess something," Robinson said.</p><p>The confession has raised new questions about the April 2004 death of Amy Yates, the Carroll County girl whose death spurred a movement to reform Georgia's juvenile sentencing laws after authorities charged her 12-year-old neighbor in her death. The 18-year-old who stepped forward also lived in the same rural trailer park as Yates and the boy sentenced in the girl's death.</p><p>The boy avoided trial by agreeing to be adjudicated for a delinquent act of murder. He was sentenced to up to two years in a youth detention center. In accepting the agreement, the boy did not admit to committing any delinquent act, attorney Word said at the time.</p><p>On Friday, Word alleged that his client, the younger teen, was interrogated by Georgia Bureau of Investigation agents for hours without his parents or an attorney present, resulting in a confession under pressure.</p><p>"His confession was no confession at all. He confessed to something he really didn't do," Word said.</p><p>GBI spokesman John Bankhead scoffed at the assertion and asked, "Why did he plead? Why didn't they just fight it and just go to trial?"</p><p>Amy's father, Tom Yates, told Atlanta television station WXIA on Thursday that family members "just don't wish to comment on this matter." No one answered the telephone or the door at the Yates home Friday.</p><p>In Carrolton, several miles from the trailer park, some residents also were skeptical of the 18-year-old's confession.</p><p>"It's weird. After two years, this guy wants to confess. ... It's hard for me to picture an 18-year-old boy who is mentally retarded doing it," gas station clerk Christy Norton said.</p><p>Her husband, Robert Norton, added: "He might just be saying stuff."</p>
