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Editor’s note: This is part of a two-day series in which The Herald will explore the events surrounding the deaths of a Chester County couple allegedly at the hands of their then-12-year-old grandson and issues involving juveniles in the adult criminal system.
After driving more than an hour in the crisp darkness, the black Nissan Pathfinder pulled off on a gravel road parting a hunting club in rural Cherokee County.
A half-mile later, it veered to the right on an old logging road. For the first few hours of Nov. 29, 2001, the driver hid in a grove of pine saplings with Christy, his golden retriever mix, and a cache of weapons, including the shotgun police say he used to kill his grandparents.
Miles away, a neighbor reported a fire at 950 Slick Rock Road just before midnight Nov. 28. Within hours, the bodies of Joe Frank Pittman, 66, and Joy Roberts Pittman, 62, were discovered in the rubble of their Chester County home. Onlookers noticed the Pathfinder was gone. They soon discovered the couple’s 12-year-old grandson, Christopher Pittman, also was missing.
Police issued word to be on the lookout for both. It was the second time in five weeks such a search was needed for the boy.
When he was found this time, the stakes would turn out to be much higher. Police charged him with double murder.
Christopher’s troubles existed for more than a matter of weeks, however. A state psychologist reported he was “a young man who’d had difficulty with the adults in his life.” He felt alienated from others and reported a family history of emotional problems and mental illness, she said.
His family does not deny that. This was the culmination of painful experiences and a life quickly spun out of control, they say.
“This was a lifelong progression of sadness and depression, of being let down and a lot of loss from those he loved and trusted,” said his maternal grandmother, Del Duprey of Wildwood, Fla.
Some say his personal problems don’t justify killing his grandparents, an act portrayed by the prosecutor as cold-blooded.
Though they may describe the act, that characterization does not apply to her grandson, Duprey said.
“To me, in my world, there are no 12-year-old monsters,” she said.
Troubles in his life began with his parents, Joe Dolphas Pittman and Hazel Jones Pittman. A family member called the relationship doomed from the beginning.
They met in 1986 at Wildwood High School in central Florida and quickly fell in love. Joe was a sophomore, Hazel a freshman.
Their daughter, Danielle, was born the next year. Hazel was 16.
Joe graduated the following year and joined the U.S. Army. He began boot camp at Alabama’s Fort McClellan on May 11, 1988. Eleven weeks later, he and Hazel were married.
It would be his first in a string of failed marriages.
On April 9, 1989, the young couple’s second child, Christopher Frank Pittman, was born in Huntsville, Ala. Six weeks later, he’d experience the first of a half-dozen family splits, divorces and separations when Hazel left Joe and returned to Florida.
By October 1990, she’d given birth to another son by another man and Joe was deployed as part of Operation Desert Storm.
Hazel left the family while Joe was away, leaving the children with Duprey, her mother. It’d be a decade before the children would see their mother again.
“They had no relationship with their mother, and that was her choice,” said Duprey, who adopted Hazel’s third child, Christopher’s half-brother, and raised him as her own son. “My daughter left them when they were born, basically.”
Joe returned from the Middle East in March 1991 and moved with the children back to Alabama, where he was stationed. When he was discharged that December, they moved in with his parents in Oxford, Fla.
Joe remarried in 1992 but was separated again a year later. He and the children moved back in with “Nanna” and “Pop-Pop,” as his parents were called.
“My mom and dad were really like their parents,” Joe said.
Joy cooked for the family and washed the children’s clothes. She drove Danielle 40 miles round-trip to dance lessons in Ocala, Fla. Every morning, she took Christopher to North Sumter Primary School, where he went to class and she worked as a receptionist.
Around the house, the kids played on the 5-acre property, swimming in the pool or taking rides with their grandfather on his Allis Chalmers tractor.
Joe and the kids eventually got their own place a few miles away, but the children still saw their grandparents daily.
Christopher and his grandfather were especially close. They shared a middle name, Frank, and many of the same passions, including hunting, fishing and taking things apart.
“My dad was his hero,” Joe said. “He (Christopher) was under his feet constantly, waiting to learn from him.”
In 1997, the grandparents moved to South Carolina, building a house in rural Chester County.
Joe Frank Pittman was born in 1935 in a mill village in Lando. He and his wife often visited family there. In the 1980s, the couple bought 20 acres deep in the woods off Slick Rock Road, where they long planned to retire.
The move devastated the grandchildren they’d helped raise. Christopher, then 8, took their departure especially hard.
“I did, too, to be honest,” his father said.
Life goes on
A maintenance worker with the Sumter County, Fla., school district, Joe, now 35, did all he could to give his children normal lives.
Christopher liked playing video games and played centerfield for his youth baseball team. He was nicknamed “Bug” because of his love of insects.
Described as quiet and reserved, Christopher was whippet-thin. Family photographs, some salvaged from his grandparents’ burned house, depict his chestnut eyes and hair and a smile stretching to the edges of his narrow face.
Although Joe Frank and Joy had moved nearly 500 miles away, their grandchildren visited often. Christopher became friends with many of the boys in the area.
“He (Christopher) was well-rounded, well-liked,” said the Rev. Chris Snelgrove of New Hope Methodist Church. “He was as normal and carefree of a little boy as there was.”
In Chester, Christopher enjoyed swimming in creeks, camping and playing in the woods, his father said. He loved riding his grandfather’s four-wheeler. Neighbors said he also enjoyed driving the family car up and down the long, dirt driveway — something they say his grandfather often allowed.
Life in Florida changed in 1996, when Joe remarried once again. This one brought more children, two daughters. Their arrival, however, had a negative effect on Christopher, a state psychologist reported.
The boy’s father said those effects were no different than what many other children experience. “There are a lot of things that affected Christopher, just like they would any child,” Joe said.
Christopher and his sister were held to high academic standards. In March 2001, Christopher was chosen to participate in a Florida program that would provide four years of college after graduation.
Like his own father, Joe was loving but strict; and Christopher got into trouble at times that brought spankings or being restricted from watching television, using the computer or playing video games.
He once wore his father’s Army fatigues for Uniform Day at South Sumter Middle School. When a boy took his hat, Joe said Christopher “jumped on the kid” to get it back.
Another time, he and a friend shot up a mobile home with a pellet gun. And there was an instance when he chased after his sister with a baseball bat.
“Taken out of context, it sounds terrible,” Duprey said. “It was just kids being kids, though.”
Mother returns
Joe and his third wife split in 2001. Later that summer, Christopher and Danielle got something they’d always wanted: a chance to get to know their mother.
“They’d been through two stepmothers and naturally wanted their own mother,” Duprey said.
The reunion proved bittersweet.
Hazel came to Florida for a two-week vacation a few months after giving birth to her seventh child. The stay ended up lasting months, Duprey said.
Hazel told her mother and Joe she’d changed and wanted to get to know her other children.
As the stay got longer, Hazel rented a mobile home near Oxford and brought her four children who were living with her down from Virginia. Her husband was to follow, Duprey said.
Hazel and Joe, however, began to rekindle their old relationship.
“She told Joe that she and her husband were separated,” Duprey said.
As the romance grew, so did the relationship between Hazel and her first two children, Duprey said.
Hazel and Danielle shared clothes. She met her daughter’s friends and even took her to register for high school, Duprey said.
Christopher and his mother also shared things, Duprey said. Both are shy by nature.
“He seemed very happy around her,” Duprey said. “They both were. They thought it was wonderful. They finally had a mother — their mother.”
By October, though, Hazel’s husband threatened to take custody of their children.
The next time Joe and the children came by her mobile home, Hazel told them to get their things, Duprey said. “She told them to leave and don’t come back. She said she wasn’t going to lose custody of her children over this. ... She hurt them all over again.”
Within days, Christopher decided he’d had enough, Duprey said.
Running to Chester
He ran away from his Sumter County, Fla., home sometime after 11 p.m. on Oct. 23, 2001, taking a back pack and $70 cash. Deputies in neighboring Marion County picked Christopher up at an Arby’s restaurant along Interstate 75 the following day, according to a sheriff’s office report.
A day earlier, he’d asked his sister which way was north. He was planning to run away to his grandparents’ home in Chester.
Life at home had grown unbearable. Bad grades had Christopher on restriction — no television, no video games. The relationship with his father was strained from arrival of his two new siblings and the dwindling attention coming his way, a state psychologist later explained.
Christopher reported his father had beat him, but an investigator from the Florida Department of Child and Families determined the claim wasn’t true. That night, the boy threatened to harm himself.
He was committed to Lifestream Behavioral Center in Leesburg, Fla., for a few days, his father said. Doctors diagnosed him as clinically depressed and put him on Paxil, an antidepressant widely used to treat depression in adults but not approved for people under 18.
A temporary move
Hoping it would help, Joe agreed to let Christopher temporarily move to Chester.
“When he left here, he was thrilled,” Duprey said. “He was going to live with Nanna and Pop-Pop.”
Christopher was enrolled at Chester Middle School and attended New Hope Methodist, where Joy played the organ and Joe Frank sang in the choir. He was also taken to a family doctor, who switched his medication to Zoloft, an antidepressant the family blames for causing the deaths.
Church members knew Christopher had problems and that his grandparents were working with him, the Rev. Snelgrove said.
It was clear the boy had changed from prior visits. He’d become withdrawn and mouthy, Snelgrove said. “It was a noticeable difference that everyone could see.”
Family members in Florida also noticed a change, though in a different way, when Christopher and his grandparents visited Florida for Thanksgiving. He was happy but hyperactive, something that was out of character, they said.
“He never did anything in 10th gear,” Duprey said. “He was always so laid back.”
Joe said his oldest daughter first noticed the change but didn’t think much of it because he was so happy. Joe remembered his son couldn’t wait to take his medicine.
“He was almost like a drug addict,” Joe said. “I thought it was odd but thought he was trying to be responsible.”
Within days of returning to Chester, that would prove to be terribly off-base.
Losing control
On the way home from school on Nov. 27, 2001, Christopher began picking on a smaller, younger boy, according to another child who was on the bus.
All three boys got on and off at the same bus stop, said the boy, now 11.
Near the end of the 45-minute ride, Christopher pinned a then-9-year-old boy’s head against the window and choked him using two fingers. “It began by him playing around,” said the boy, who was sitting between the two.
The younger boy soon began crying, and the third boy said he tried to break it up. When they got off the bus, Christopher told the boy he’d kill him if he told anyone. The boy dismissed it as nothing.
The next day, the parents of the boy who was choked reported the incident. School officials called the Pittmans.
The boy’s grandfather picked Christopher up and told officials he’d “handle it when he got home,” Chester County Sheriff Maj. James McNeil said. Investigators later said the grandparents demanded that Christopher write a letter of apology. They also threatened to send him back to Florida if his behavior didn’t improve, the state psychologist reported.
That night, the couple attended rehearsal at church. Christopher went with them. Witnesses, including the boy who’d tried to break up the fight, reported that Christopher was extremely quiet. He sat alone while other children rehearsed for a Christmas play.
The Pittmans left around 8 p.m., and everything seemed fine, a witness said. They were going home to help their grandson with his homework.
Within hours, a fire was reported on Slick Rock Road. People first thought the woods were burning because of the intense red glow in the night sky. As firefighters and dozens of neighbors arrived at the scene, they realized it was the Pittmans’ house. Most thought no one was home because the car was gone.
Combing through the rubble, investigators discovered two bodies. Labeled as Jane and John Doe until they could be positively identified, everyone knew they were the bodies of Joy and Joe Frank Pittman. They were found side-by-side on the remnants of a mattress in an upstairs bedroom.
When a third body wasn’t found, police issued an all-points bulletin for Christopher and the Pathfinder.
Solving a mystery
Terry Robinson hadn’t heard the news by daybreak when he saw the Pathfinder while hunting near Thicketty Creek in Cherokee County. The off-duty firefighter said no one was inside.
His hunting partner, Roland Pennington, soon came across Christopher in the woods. The boy was wearing camouflage and carrying a rifle, Robinson said.
Christopher’s dog, Christy, was barking nearby.
The boy told the men there was “a bunch of money and guns in the car,” Robinson said. “He said some guy had him down in the woods. He claimed he’d been kidnapped.”
The three walked about two miles to the Corinth Volunteer Fire Department. Robinson took investigators back to the site. Christopher stayed at the station, watching cartoons and eating cheeseburgers, Robinson said.
The boy told firefighters, like he would later tell Chester County and State Law Enforcement Division investigators, he’d been sleeping in his grandparents’ house when he heard a noise outside. He said he looked out the window of his first-story bedroom to see a black man enter the house from the front porch.
Christopher told officers he ran outside and hid, because he was afraid of the intruder, Chester County Sheriff’s Detective Lucinda McKellar said during a June court hearing.
Christopher told authorities he heard four shots fired before the man came outside and ordered him to get the keys to the Pathfinder. The man then used a gasoline can to set the house on fire before forcing him into the car and taking him to Cherokee County.
When asked about the dog, however, investigators got suspicious. The boy said Christy followed him. “That’s when the red flags went up,” McNeil said.
Information about the fight on the bus came in around the same time and McKellar’s approach changed. Christopher became a suspect. He was read his rights and taken to the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office. That’s where investigators say he confessed.
Details from the boy’s father and testimony given by a state psychologist, a SLED fire investigator and McKellar at June’s family court hearing revealed many details of what really happened that night.
After returning from church, Joy went straight to bed. She was exhausted because of the stress caused by Christopher’s troubles at school. The boy and his grandfather stayed up for a while, watching a nature program on television in the living room of the ranch-style house.
They both eventually went to bed, Joe Frank in the loft upstairs and Christopher to his bedroom at the bottom of the staircase.
Sometime later, the boy got up and went into the living room. From the gun cabinet tucked beneath the stairs, he removed the pump-action, .410-gauge shotgun his grandfather had given his father for his 10th birthday.
Joe gave the gun to his son at Thanksgiving, something he says he now regrets.
With the shotgun loaded with bird shot, Christopher climbed the stairs to the dark loft. He turned left at the top landing and faced the side of the bed where his grandfather was likely sleeping. Without turning on the lights, he fired at least two shots — one into his grandfather’s open mouth and another into the back of his grandmother’s head.
He found candles in the medicine cabinet of the upstairs bathroom. He placed lit candles around the house and set a blaze with lighter fluid and gasoline from a can for the four-wheeler.
Making sense of it all
The confession led to charges of double murder and arson. Though he was 12 at the time of the killings, a family court judge agreed to waive the boy up to adult court in June. John Justice, 6th circuit solicitor, requested the move, citing the “absolute cold-bloodedness” of the crime.
The death penalty was not sought. In 1988, the U.S. Supreme Court set 16 as the minimum age for capital punishment.
Now 14, Christopher could get 30 years to life in prison if convicted. The case may go before a grand jury within the next few weeks for an indictment to go to trial. The defense and prosecution could also reach a plea agreement at any time and avoid a trial altogether.
His family, however, isn’t interested in a plea agreement. They don’t doubt that Christopher pulled the trigger but feel he doesn’t deserve to spend a day in adult prison. He may have committed the act, but he is not criminally responsible, they say.
They blame the medication.
Though he suffered from depression, Duprey said antidepressants changed her grandson.
“Until that point, he was still Christopher,” she said. “Then you bring medication into the equation, and it changed this quiet boy. And all of this happened in a very short period of time.”
Instead of jail time, the boy’s father believes his son needs extensive therapy. “He’ll need that just with the trauma of having to live with this the rest of his life.”
Christopher just wants this all to end, Duprey said. “He wants closure. He wants answers to what he’s facing. It’s been two years.”
The answer, however, could bring years — possibly all he has left — in prison.
Duprey hopes that doesn’t happen. She doubts the criminal justice system could punish her grandson as much as he’ll punish himself.
During a recent conversation in Columbia, Duprey said Christopher told her, “Grandma, I know God forgives me. I know my grandparents forgive me. But I don’t think I’ll ever forgive myself.”
http://www.heraldonline.com/local/story/2981054p-2731761c.html
Judge could send teen away for life
Published: Monday, October, 27th, 2003
By The Herald
CHESTER — A judge may soon end a saga that began with the killing of a Chester County couple by their then 12-year-old grandson. Now a half-foot taller and two years older, Christopher Pittman’s ordeal could come to an end after more than 600 days in the making.
No one has challenged whether he shot Joe Frank Pittman and Joy Roberts Pittman, as police have alleged, while they slept late Nov. 28, 2001. No one has publicly disputed allegations he then set their Slick Rock Road house on fire and fled to Cherokee County.
Questions revolve only around why he did it and whether he is criminally responsible.
Sixth Circuit Solicitor John Justice believes the cold-blooded acts deserve severe punishment. The boy’s family believes a month-long regimen of antidepressant medication pushed him over the edge and that psychological help is needed, not decades in an adult prison.
All evidence will have been weighed, the witnesses and experts heard. The 12 jurors will have returned from deliberations and will again be seated in the Chester County Courthouse. Their verdict will be in the judge’s hands.
If the jury decides Christopher is not guilty, the 14 year old will reconnect with his family after two years of separation. If they conclude he is guilty, the judge could issue one of the harshest sentences in modern U.S. history to a person his age at the time of the crime.
Christopher is charged with double murder and arson. He faces between 30 years and life in prison. He has been housed at a Department of Juvenile Justice center in Columbia since he was arrested Nov. 29, 2001.
The solicitor offers no apologies for the sentence he wants — life without parole. Justice feels that he’s charged with protecting society. Only life behind bars can guarantee that, he said.
‘To try him as a juvenile, at best, would put him back on the streets at 21,’ Justice said. ‘That’s a risk I was not willing to take.’
Some say with that went any chance for rehabilitation.
But there’s a possibility the boy could get 30 years and be out of prison at age 42, a man raised by the prison system. Statistics show there’s a good chance he’d be anything but a model citizen, some say.
That’s a risk Justice is willing to take.
Believing the boy is a ‘teenage sociopath,’ Justice said the only remedy for the condition is time.
‘As one gets older, they generally grow out of their mean streak,’ Justice said.
While there’s always some risk he could regress and harm others, Justice said there’s less chance of that at age 42 than 21.
‘My goal is keeping him behind bars as long as possible,’ Justice said, adding the only way to do that was to get the boy waived up to adult court.
He accomplished that goal in June, when Family Court Judge Walter Brown Jr. agreed to have the boy tried in criminal court.
‘Based on the evidence presented, it is the opinion of this Court that it is not likely the Defendant could be rehabilitated,’ Brown wrote in his order, offering the seriousness of the offenses, protecting the community and because the ‘alleged offenses are of a premeditated nature’ as reasons for his decision.
When faced with similar choices regarding very young juveniles in recent years, other courts around the country have made similar decisions:
• McKinley Moore in 1999 became the first Michigan child sentenced as an adult. He pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in the shooting death of a 55-year-old barber when he was 12. He will stay in a juvenile treatment center until he is 19. Then a decision will be made whether to keep him incarcerated until he is 21 or send him to prison for life.
• Nathaniel Brazill was convicted of second-degree murder for the May 2000 shooting death of his teacher in West Palm Beach, Fla., when he was 13. Brazill was tried as an adult and sentenced to 28 years in prison. An appeal was denied in May.
• Lionel Tate was sentenced to life in prison without parole in Florida for killing a 6-year-old girl in 1999 using wrestling moves he’d seen on television. He was 12. Many believe he is the youngest person to ever receive such a sentence. A Florida appeals court is now considering whether Tate was too young for such a sentence. He’s being held in a juvenile jail.
• A Michigan court in 2001 denied an appeal of a life sentence for 13-year-old killer Martez Stewart, who stabbed a teenage neighbor 33 times. He pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and is now in a juvenile correction center. He will be eligible for parole in 2008.
• Nathaniel Abraham in 1999 became the youngest person believed to have been tried and convicted of murder in the United States. He was convicted of second-degree murder for shooting a Pontiac, Mich., man in 1997, when he was 11. A first-degree murder conviction would have brought life in prison without parole.
The first person tried under a new Michigan law allowing juveniles to be charged and sentenced as adults, Abraham will not spend time in an adult prison. Judge Eugene Moore placed him in a boys training school in the juvenile justice system. He will be released when he turns 21.
‘We can’t continue to see incarceration in adult prison as a long-term solution,’ National Public Radio reported the judge said after sentencing. ‘The danger is that we won’t take rehabilitation seriously if we know we can utilize prison in the future. To sentence juveniles to adult prison is ignoring the possibility that we are creating a more dangerous criminal by housing juveniles with hardened adults.’
If convicted, Christopher Pittman, the Chester boy, likely would remain in the custody of DJJ until his 17th birthday. He would then be transferred to the adult prison system.
Adult crime, adult time
Gary Walker, a member of the National District Attorneys Association’s Juvenile Justice Advisory Committee, agrees that juveniles should be tried as adults under certain circumstances. He is not familiar with the Chester County case but does know Justice.
‘It’s always decided on a case-by-case basis,’ said the Marquette County, Mich., prosecutor. ‘We don’t just look at the crime or just the age. The more serious the crime is, the more you probably look to waive. First and foremost, we look to protect society.’
A standard approach adopted by the district attorneys association considers a number of factors, Walker said, including the defendant’s background, psychological assessments and the offense.
‘I haven’t met anyone yet who enjoys trying juveniles as adults,’ Walker said. ‘Not only do I not get pleasure out of it, it troubles me. It’s a waste of a life.’
Increasingly, however, it’s what prosecutors are choosing.
A 2000 Bureau of Justice Statistics report showed the number of juveniles in adult prisons more than doubled between 1985 and 1997, the latest year data is available, from 3,400 to 7,400.
Those who oppose trying children as adults often say the person seen as a juvenile is not always the person they become as an adult. Walker agrees.
‘Very frankly, the person you see at 18 isn’t the person you see at age 25,’ Walker said.
He added, however, that the best indicator for future behavior is past behavior. ‘And that’s true at 14, 24, 34 or 44.’
Protecting society?
Some question how much risk should be taken with a child’s life, convicted killer or not. Others question whether society is really protected by putting juveniles in adult prisons or placed at greater risk once they get out.
A Florida study conducted in the 1990s showed juveniles sentenced to and released from adult prisons are more likely to reoffend, to reoffend earlier, to commit more subsequent offenses and to commit more serious, subsequent offenses than those treated in the juvenile system.
The American Civil Liberties Union reports putting children in adult prisons also places them in danger. According to the ACLU, juveniles sentenced to adult prisons instead of juvenile jails are:
• Five times more likely to be sexually assaulted;
• Twice as likely to be beaten by staff members; and
• 50 percent more likely to be attacked with a weapon.
Problems arise when children are treated like adults in the criminal justice system, said Marc Mauer of The Sentencing Project, a national nonprofit organization on criminal justice policies. Historically, the adult system has been about punishment and locking people away, he said, whereas the juvenile system is designed for rehabilitation.
‘To say you need to protect society, I don’t think that means we have to give up on 12-year-olds,’ Mauer said. ‘Society doesn’t normally believe people are completely beyond change, especially at that age.’
The drug war
Family members and friends close to Christopher say that change has already begun — especially in light of extensive therapy he’s received in the DJJ center, but more importantly because he’s been taken off prescription antidepressants.
His family — including his father Joe D. Pittman and maternal grandmother Del Duprey, both of Florida — believes antidepressant medication triggered a behavioral change in the boy that led him to kill.
After running away from his Oxford, Fla., home in October 2001, Christopher told police his father had beat him. Authorities determined the allegations weren’t true, but placed the boy in a treatment center for a few days after he threatened to harm himself. There he was diagnosed as being clinically depressed and prescribed Paxil.
He came to live with his grandparents in Chester later that month. He was taken to a family doctor there who switched his medication to Zoloft.
Both Paxil and Zoloft are classified as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs. The entire category is being reviewed by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration after clinical studies surfaced showing depressed children treated with these drugs may experience increased desires to harm themselves.
The British government has banned certain SSRIs, including Paxil, from use with children.
The U.S. government has not taken similar measures, though the FDA reminded doctors in June the drugs are not approved to treat depressed children.
After being detained in Columbia, Christopher was cited for numerous behavioral problems, a state psychologist reported. That’s because DJJ officials once again put him on Paxil, his father said.
A DJJ doctor called Joe D. Pittman in Florida and said his son was under a bed telling people to leave him alone and stay away. He’d been getting into fights and had cut marks.
After successfully pleading with doctors to stop giving Christopher antidepressants, Joe D. Pittman said his son’s behavior, attitude and grades improved. In fact, he was the only person on his wing to make the spring honor roll.
The nonprofit group Inter-national Coalition for Drug Awareness is pushing for Congressional hearings into potential hazards of children using antidepressants.
The FDA is scheduled to hold an advisory meeting Feb. 2. The coalition will attend and present the Pittman case as a Zoloft example, said Lisa Van Syckel, the group’s New Jersey coordinator. The boy’s family also plans to attend the meetings in Bethesda, Md.
‘I’m furious. The United Kingdom has taken safeguards to protect British children. Those same safeguards should be in place for American children,’ Van Syckel said. ‘Parents of those who are not taking the medication need to be concerned, too, not just those of the children on the medication.’
The coalition isn’t alone in advocating that point.
Support from Columbine
Mark Taylor, one of the first people shot during the Col-umbine High School massacre in Littleton, Colo., travels the country warning others of the dangers sometimes created by juveniles on antidepressants.
Taylor, now 20, sued drug maker Solvay Pharmaceuti-cals. He claims Eric Harris, one of the students who went on the rampage that left 12 other students and a teacher dead, ‘reported he was having psychotic reactions to the drug,’ Taylor said. Harris was on Luvox, also an SSRI. He had previously been on Zoloft.
In 2002, Taylor traveled to all 50 states during an eight-month tour and saw people affected by problems with prescription antidepressants ‘with his own eyes.’
‘I’m not talking one or two, or 10 or 20,’ said Taylor, who was featured in ‘Bowling for Columbine,’ Michael Moore’s Academy Award-winning documentary. ‘We’ve seen literally thousands of people whose lives have been destroyed by these drugs. ... When people take these drugs, they don’t just hurt themselves. They’re going on killing sprees.’
Taylor said drug company officials gave him a copy of a file showing what Harris’ life was like, down to the things he ate.
Cheese, for example, can cause bad reactions in some patients taking antidepressants, Taylor said. Harris ate a lot of pizza.
‘So it wasn’t like we just pointed fingers at the antidepressants. We looked at it and studied it,’ Taylor said. ‘I wish I could just forget about it and let the drug companies go on, but I can’t. There are too many cases and too many families that have been devastated by these drugs.’
Juries regarding drugs
GlaxoSmithKline, the British manufacturer of Paxil, settled an appeal in 2001 after a Wyoming jury found the drug played a role in a 1998 murder/suicide.
A federal civil suit was filed against Glaxo after Donald Schell killed his wife, daughter and granddaughter and then himself in February 1998. Two days before the killings, the 60-year-old man began taking Paxil.
The family claimed the drug caused Schell’s actions. The jury agreed, placing 80 percent of the blame on the drug maker and awarding the family $8 million.
Other cases haven’t ended as fortunately for the accused.
In September, a Virginia woman claiming Paxil caused her to stomp her 82-year-old mother to death was convicted of second-degree murder. The 49-year-old could be sentenced up to 40 years in prison at a hearing on Nov. 24.
The Associated Press reported the woman’s lawyers argued her judgment and self-control were affected by the medication and claimed she was not criminally responsible for her mother’s death. There was no jury in the case, but the judge disagreed.
Andy Vickery, a Houston attorney specializing in suits against pharmaceutical companies, won the Wyoming wrongful death suit. It was the first civil challenge a SSRI maker lost in court.
‘There’s a ‘small, vulnerable subpopulation’ who are susceptible to violence from SSRI drugs,’ Vickery said. ‘It’s there, it’s real and the drug companies have known about it for a decade or more.’
Vickery, however, doesn’t believe the drugs should be banned. Most people who take them are undoubtedly helped, he said. But he believes the drugs can be harmful to a select few — as many as 5 percent.
While those patients may experience side effects that can lead to violent behavior, not all act on those tendencies, he said. Many stop taking the drugs. Of those who don’t, a few commit ‘horribly out-of-character, horribly violent acts,’ Vickery said.
Though he’s spent 25 years as a trial attorney, the last eight have heavily dealt with suits against drug companies. In that time, Vickery said he’s only ever considered two criminal cases involving antidepressants. The Pittman case was one of those.
In the end, though, it comes down to having enough money to mount a proper defense, Vickery said.
Cases involving antidepressants often offer ‘involuntary intoxication’ as a defense, he said.
Unlike voluntary intoxication, which involves illicit drugs like cocaine or LSD, involuntary intoxication is reserved for prescription drugs that can mimic illegal ones in some people, he said.
‘You have a drug that in some respects is very similar to LSD and cocaine, but it comes in a pill your doctor prescribes and the pharmacy fills,’ Vickery said of SSRIs.
To convince a jury of that, however, often requires costly experts, Vickery said.
‘The Pittman case desperately needs a defense that has enough money to hire experts not only with the expertise, but the flat-out courage to say it,’ he said.
In the absence of such experts and defense budgets, cases such as this often end up getting settled without going to trial, Vickery said. That’s particularly true in civil cases, he said, where only three out of hundreds of suits have ever gone before a jury. The same holds true for criminal cases, Vickery said.
Joe D. Pittman has said repeatedly that he wished he had the money to hire such experts and seasoned attorneys to help his son. But he doesn’t. That doesn’t mean he’s given up hope, however, or his belief that his son’s medication led to the deaths of his parents.
‘There should definitely be reasonable doubt,’ Joe D. Pittman said. ‘Yes, he committed the crime. But was he in his own right mind? No.’
That’s a point he hopes will have resonated within the minds of jurors while deliberating to help decide Chris-topher’s fate.
The group of 12 could soon be seated in the jury box. Father will again be seated behind son.
The judge will finally ask the boy to rise. He’ll then look down and read the verdict.
Guilty or not?
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