NEW YORK—The parents of an American student accused in a sensational Italian sex slaying said in an interview broadcast Friday that their daughter could never have committed such a crime.
Amanda Knox tells her parents, "Why am I here when I didn't do anything?" her father, William Knox, said in the interview on ABC's "Good Morning America." It was the parents' first extensive interview since the November slaying of Meredith Kercher.
Kercher, a 21-year-old student from Leeds University in England, was found dead in the apartment she shared with Knox in the central Italian town of Perugia where both were studying. She had been sexually assaulted and died of a knife wound to the neck.
Amanda Knox, a University of Washington student from Seattle, was taken into custody along with two other people in connection with the death.
"She says she's tired a lot," her mother, Edda Mellas, told ABC. "Jail's not easy."
The parents said the coverage of the case, which has portrayed their 20-year-old daughter as a sexually adventurous party girl, has been unfair. "One hundred eighty degrees opposite of anything we have ever known her to be," her father said. Asked if she could have committed a crime, he said: "Never. ... It's not her."
Further material from the interview was to be broadcast later Friday on the network's "20/20" program.
Knox and her then-boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, 23, were jailed Nov. 6. A judge has ruled that both can be held for as long as a year while the investigation continues.
The third person in custody is Rudy Hermann Guede, a native of Ivory Coast. Another suspect, Congolese pub owner Diya "Patrick" Lumumba, was released from jail but has not been formally cleared.
Court documents allege that Knox has changed her account, including whether she was at home or at her boyfriend's the night of the slaying.
But her mother told ABC her story has stayed "absolutely consistent" except for the first interrogation, when she was "the most scared that she's ever been in her entire life" and without a lawyer or an interpreter.
Italian investigators said that an interpreter was present at all times during the questioning, while a lawyer was not needed because Knox was not a suspect at the time.
ABC also interviewed Amanda Knox's sister, Deanna, who called her "the kindest person I know. She will do anything to make people happy and she cares about everyone else before herself."
