Tell me why these creeps shouldn't fry!

[RedGlitter]

In the interest of our ongoing death penalty discussion, please tell me why we should keep these wastes of sperm and egg in prison instead of killing them...?



August 7, 2007

When Horror Came to a Connecticut Family

By MANNY FERNANDEZ and ALISON LEIGH COWAN

CHESHIRE, Conn., Aug. 6 — Dr. William A. Petit Jr., his head bloodied and legs bound, stumbled out of a rear basement door of his two-story home here into a pouring rain, calling the name of a neighbor for help.

The neighbor heard the shouting, but so did the two men inside the house, who peeked outside from an upstairs window. They were both serial burglars with drug habits, having racked up numerous convictions for stealing car keys and pocketbooks.



This time, they took something far more precious.

The men, the authorities say, had already strangled Dr. Petit’s wife, Jennifer Hawke-Petit, 48, and in short order would also kill the couple’s two daughters, Hayley, 17, and Michaela, 11. The elder suspect, Steven J. Hayes, 44, had poured gasoline on the girls and their mother, according to a lawyer and a law enforcement official involved in the case, in hopes of concealing DNA evidence of sexual assault. He had raped Ms. Hawke-Petit, and his partner, Joshua Komisarjevsky, 26, had sexually assaulted Michaela.

Moments after Dr. Petit escaped, as the house was being surrounded by police officers, the men lighted the gasoline. The girls were tied to their beds but alive when the gas Mr. Hayes had spread around the house was set aflame.



It was about 9:50 a.m. on July 23 when Dr. Petit, 50, burst into his backyard on what is normally a quiet street in a quiet town of 29,000 in central Connecticut. On this stormy summer morning it was the site of one of the most savage crimes in the state in decades. By 10:01, Mr. Hayes and Mr. Komisarjevsky had been captured. On Tuesday morning they are expected to be presented in New Haven County Court for their first appearance in the venue where they will be tried; they have been formally charged in State Superior Court in Meriden with capital felonies, which could bring the death penalty.



Interviews with law enforcement officials and lawyers for the men, and friends, co-workers and relatives of all involved, along with a study of court records, paint a picture of what happened that morning and show that there were missed opportunities on both sides of the law leading up to the deaths.



The criminal justice system failed to treat Mr. Hayes and Mr. Komisarjevsky as serious offenders despite long histories of recidivism, repeatedly setting them free on parole. The suspects never capitalized on those chances to turn their lives around, instead apparently forming a new criminal alliance after meeting at a drug treatment center in Hartford.

“There’s no question about it: The system didn’t work, Dr. Petit’s father, William A. Petit Sr., 73, said last weekend outside his home in Plainville, 12 miles north, where the family has long formed a pillar of civic life. He paused, then added: “It’s too late now.

It started out like any summer Sunday.

After 18 holes of golf with his father, Dr. Petit returned home to the beige clapboard colonial on a corner lot on hilly Sorghum Mill Drive where the family had lived since 1989. A renowned diabetes expert, he helped write “The Encyclopedia of Diabetes and is medical director of the Joslin Diabetes Center at the Hospital of Central Connecticut. Yet he had never strayed far from where he grew up.



Deep Roots, Bright Futures

His father used to sell trinkets at a general store on Whiting Street in Plainville. The store closed, but the elder Mr. Petit kept an office on Whiting, while his son opened a medical practice a short walk down the street, where the walls of his examining rooms are decorated not with awards, but with pictures of his family.



That Sunday, Michaela — a budding cook whom people called K. K. — made a pasta sauce of native tomatoes, garlic, olive oil and basil and mixed up a balsamic vinaigrette for the salad. At a memorial service for his family, Dr. Petit said that whenever he came home to find Michaela watching the Food Network, he knew he would have to catch the basketball game in the office upstairs. “Sometimes if it was a long day I pulled rank, he admitted.

Hayley — Hayes to relatives — dreamed of becoming a doctor like her father, and was bound for Dartmouth College, his alma mater. She was always following in Dr. Petit’s footsteps, shadowing him at the hospital on Saturdays, walking behind his white coattails into patients’ rooms.



In April, the Petits celebrated their 22nd wedding anniversary. They had met at Children’s Hospital in Pittsburgh, where she was a new nurse and he was a third-year medical student. For their first date, he invited her to dinner, but also invited his parents and two of his parents’ friends.

In Cheshire, where the median household income is $80,466, the Petits lived in a home valued at $387,000, with eight rooms and a brick fireplace. Next to the basketball rim out back was a small enclosed trampoline. There were soccer balls and lacrosse sticks in bins in the garage.



They were charitable with their time and money, particularly in support of multiple sclerosis, the degenerative muscle disease that Ms. Hawke-Petit had been battling for eight years. Hayley, who rowed on the school crew and was a playmaker on the basketball court, had recently been hospitalized with a collapsed lung.



A month before the killings, friends and relatives gathered on Sorghum Mill Drive to celebrate Hayley’s graduation from the all-girls Miss Porter’s School in Farmington. There were bouquets of white daisies on the tables outside. Deb Hereld, the mother of one of Hayley’s childhood friends, remembered Michaela skipping through the house, turning around to flash her a smile.

“I kind of always joked, said Christopher J. Wazorko, a Plainville town councilman, “if you weren’t with your own family, you’d certainly want to be a Petit.



Mismatched Intruders

The authorities say the intruders entered the house through an open door at 3 a.m. Monday as Dr. Petit slept in a chair on the first floor, his wife and daughters in their rooms upstairs. The previous evening, the men had followed Ms. Hawke-Petit and Michaela home from the parking lot of a Super Stop & Shop three miles away.



They were a mismatched pair. Mr. Komisarjevsky (pronounced ko-mi-sor-JEFF-ski) is tall and thin, Mr. Hayes shorter and stockier. Mr. Komisarjevsky lived with his parents in Cheshire, 1.7 miles from the Petits. Mr. Hayes was born in Florida and was raised by a single mother, with whom he still lived in Winsted, a working-class town of 7,000 some 30 miles away.

Mr. Komisarjevsky had been breaking into houses since the age of 14, generally sneaking in at night through unlocked back doors in Cheshire and similar suburbs, wearing latex gloves and military night-vision goggles.

Mr. Hayes had spent his whole adult life in and out of prison for burglary. He specialized not in homes but in cars: He went to public parks and broke into parked cars with a rock, sometimes taking the vehicle, more often just snatching something inside to sell.

They took big risks for small rewards, grabbing a purse or a money clip, a vase or some silver or a pair of boots. They got high on marijuana and cocaine; Mr. Komisarjevsky also used crystal methamphetamine. They led ragged lives, out of sync with the orderly homes they sneaked into at night.



Chance had brought them together at a residential drug treatment center and a halfway house in Hartford, where their stays happened to overlap. They were both fathers: Mr. Komisarjevsky’s daughter, now 5, was born while he was behind bars; Mr. Hayes has two teenage children who live with their mother and stepfather in a blue-collar neighborhood of Torrington.



Cheshire, with the modest motto, “Bedding Plant Capital of Connecticut, is, like its neighbor towns in the heart of Connecticut, a community of clapboard homes, big lawns and weekly Rotary Club meetings. People grow old on the same streets where they grew up. Every resident seems to have a dog, and every turn seems to lead to Main Street.

There have been three homicides in the past decade. People still go to bed with doors unlocked.



The authorities say that the Petit home was at least the third in Cheshire that the two men burglarized since the start of that weekend. They sneaked into one through a screen door and took a money clip —with credit and A.T.M. cards, and $140 in cash — from the kitchen counter Sunday morning. They broke in through a back screen of another Saturday night.

Why the spree turned violent on Sorghum Mill Drive remains unclear.

On Sunday evening, Mr. Hayes and Mr. Komisarjevsky had driven to a nearby Wal-Mart and bought an air rifle and rope. Once inside the house, they clubbed Dr. Petit over the head with a baseball bat and tied him up in the basement.



Between 4 and 4:30 a.m., Mr. Hayes went to a BP station on Main Street, where he bought four cans of gasoline.



A Life on a Rap Sheet

Mr. Hayes had been in Cheshire before — at the Manson Youth Institution and at the Cheshire Correctional Institution, both in the early 1980s. They were two of 17 prisons and detention centers around the state where he spent time as he bounced in and out of the system over the next 25 years. For a mug shot taken as he was being paroled in May, prisoner No. 97425 smiled for the camera.

“For all his involvement in the penal system, he didn’t come across as a hardened criminal, said Pete Hoban, who worked with Mr. Hayes years ago when Mr. Hayes was a cook at the Saybrook Fish House. “He was mild.

He drifted from job to job, from crime to crime, from parole to jail and back again. His life story unfolds on his rap sheet: arrested for the first time at 16; burglarized a house in New Hartford at 24; reprimanded in prison for assault at 29; arrested for drug possession at 38.

Mr. Hayes’s father left home when he and his brother, Brian, were boys. Neighbors said they used to hear the two fighting and yelling at the condominium where they lived with their mother. “He got out of jail and didn’t know how to live in the real world, said a woman who spoke on the condition she not be identified because she had a personal connection to the Hayes family.

Before the Petit break-in, his last arrest was in 2003, for smashing a car window and stealing the pocketbook inside. Facing possible prosecution under the state’s repeat offender law, Mr. Hayes pleaded guilty and was sentenced to five years, heading after three to the halfway house where he met Mr. Komisarjevsky.

By May, Mr. Hayes was out on parole. His friend had been paroled the month before.



Illustrious Family Name

Over the years, the state’s Department of Correction has had trouble spelling Mr. Komisarjevsky’s name correctly.

It is a name with an illustrious history: Mr. Komisarjevsky’s great-grandfather, Fyodor, was an opera singer in Russia who married a princess. Their son, Theodore, was a popular theatrical director said to have put on a “King Lear worth crossing the ocean to see. Theodore’s last wife, Joshua’s grandmother, was an American, Ernestine Stodelle.

“My mother was a beautiful avant-garde dancer who danced with the seminal dancers of modern dance, and my father had left Russia at the time of the revolution to escape the Communists and directed theater in London and in New York, said Mr. Komisarjevsky’s uncle, Christopher Komisarjevsky. “That was the kind of environment we grew up in.

After Theodore died in 1954, Ernestine married John Chamberlain, a conservative newspaper writer who owned some 65 acres of land in Cheshire, the crowning glory of which was a pre-Revolutionary home, complete with wishing well.



That is where Joshua Komisarjevsky spent many of his teenage years with his parents, Benedict Komisarjevsky, who ran a construction company, and Jude Motyka, who home-schooled Josh and his sister, Naomi. The family had also taken in foster children, and when Mr. Komisarjevsky was 14, he was raped by one of them, his mother told an investigator for the state’s Department of Children and Families.



That was the year Mr. Komisarjevsky started breaking into homes. In 2002, he confessed to more than a dozen burglaries, and was sentenced to nine years in prison followed by six years of supervised parole. But the state’s Board of Pardons and Paroles has admitted mishandling his case by granting him parole in April 2007 without first reviewing a copy of the 2002 sentencing transcript, in which a judge called him a “calculated, cold-blooded predator.



The parole board ordered him to wear an electronic ankle bracelet for 90 days, and officials extended that period for several more, so they could monitor his return home each night. Within 72 hours of its removal July 19, the authorities said, Mr. Komisarjevsky was burglarizing homes again in Cheshire. Within 96, he was inside the Petits’.



A Note to a Bank Teller

Shortly before 9:30 a.m. that Monday, Ms. Hawke-Petit walked into a Bank of America branch and withdrew $15,000 from the account she shared with her husband. Mr. Hayes waited in the parking lot in Maplecroft Plaza, the same shopping center where the two men had watched Ms. Hawke-Petit and her daughter the day before.



Ms. Hawke-Petit told the teller that she had to have the money because her family was being held hostage, and that if the police were notified, her family would be killed.

Debbie Biggins, 50, was opening a new account at the bank when she noticed Ms. Hawke-Petit, who seemed tense and in a rush. “I could feel it, Mrs. Biggins said in a recent interview. “I felt fear. After Ms. Hawke-Petit left, Mrs. Biggins said, she saw the teller hand a manager a slip of paper.

A bank employee called 911 about 9:30. “The call came in as a suspicious transaction with a hostage situation, but it wasn’t clear, said a law enforcement official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the matter is still under investigation. The Cheshire police have refused to release a full timeline indicating when officers arrived on Sorghum Mill Drive, but described their response as “immediate.

By 9:45 a.m., seven to nine Cheshire police officers, including SWAT team members, were working to secure a perimeter around the Petit house, and a police helicopter was en route.

About five minutes later, Dr. Petit stumbled out of a basement door onto the rear of his property, calling the name of a neighbor, who took the bleeding doctor into his garage and dialed 911.

After lighting the fire, the two men jumped into the family’s Chrysler Pacifica sport utility vehicle. They crashed into a police vehicle in the driveway, then slammed into two police cruisers parked nose to nose as a barricade not far from the house, where they were taken into custody.

Inside the house on Sorghum Mill Drive, Hayley and Michaela died of smoke inhalation, not from their burns, according to the Connecticut medical examiner. Their mother was found downstairs.

A week later, Dr. Petit attended a candlelight vigil outside his medical practice on Whiting Street. He sat beneath a tent, between his mother and his father. A priest walked over to him and lighted the white candle in the doctor’s hand.

Dr. Petit stood and carried his candle around the tent, slowly and carefully lighting the candles people held up to him.

Attached files

[weeder]

The two animals who killed this family should of course get the death penalty.

But as a side note..... Dr. Petit is fortunate he walked out of that basement when hed did, and that the killers were still on the property. Because as often is the case, he would have been suspected of the crime.

[Galbally]

It reminds me of that famous set of murders that Truman Capote wrote about in his book "In Cold Blood", and equally cold blooded and horrendous. As to whether these 2 people deserve the death penalty, in terms of natural justice, I would say of course, but in terms of the law, I'm not the judge or the jury so I will leave that up to them. Terrible crime though, how tragic.

[YZGI]

That is horrific. Another one that happened in the town where I am is jsut as unbelievable or worse.



http://www.crimelibrary.com/notorious_m ... index.html

[RedGlitter]

YZGI;676258 wrote: That is horrific. Another one that happened in the town where I am is jsut as unbelievable or worse.



http://www.crimelibrary.com/notorious_m ... index.html


I couldn't read it all, YZ. All the rape was making me ill. I stopped after they beat and killed the poor dog.

See if they had just taken money or TVs I could go with prison. But in killing those people and degrading them and beating and killing the dog, they deserve to die. Except that lethal injection is too humane.

[YZGI]

RedGlitter;676352 wrote: I couldn't read it all, YZ. All the rape was making me ill. I stopped after they beat and killed the poor dog.



See if they had just taken money or TVs I could go with prison. But in killing those people and degrading them and beating and killing the dog, they deserve to die. Except that lethal injection is too humane.
What is amazing is the girl that survived. Then testified against them. She was an amazing woman with more guts than most.

[RedGlitter]

YZGI;676356 wrote: What is amazing is the girl that survived. Then testified against them. She was an amazing woman with more guts than most.


I will finish reading that in a bit. It was too much to take all at once. Too much anger, too much sadness. When I hear people say we "shouldn't judge" and should put "people" like this in prison and let God do the judging, I think about stuff like the article you posted and wonder what the heck they could be thinking.

Speaking of this woman being amazing, that reminds me of a young girl I saw on one of those true crime shows. She did all she could to be rescued. Left a barrette under the motel bed, went to the bathroom in the motel and put fingerprints on everything in it, peeked through the blindfold and noted her surroundings and the abductor/rapist's plate number. He strangled her so hard he broke all the vessels in her eyes. Her eyes were completely red. Scared the bejesus out of me when they showed her photo. But she survived and they caught the creep who hurt her. She was only about 11 I think and she had the wherewithal to do all this.

[Sheryl]

String em up!!

[joesoap]

In China criminals sentenced to death have their organs harvested to give life to otherwise dying people. In this way a convicted murderer can give life to several people after his execution. Seems like a good idea to me.

Paul.

[drumbunny1]

They should fry! Its funny how the majority of people you meet or know will probably tell you that they believe in the death penalty...especially for such a heinous crime....but how few states actually have the death penalty! It's hypocracy at its finest!!!

[joesoap]

Hang em' all

Attached files Peirpoint.mp3 (651.9 KB) 

[911]

Death penalty, definately.:-5