The Zoloft Made Me Do It

Every once in a while, one of those true crime stories pops up on 48 Hours, or 20/20, or Dateline, that catches my eye.

Tonight we had the story of Chris Pittman, a 12 year old who was living with his grandparents in Chester, South Carolina in 2001. After a disagreement with his grandfather in church, he goes home with them and, as they sleep, shoots them in the bed of their newly built home.

As you can tell from the title of this rant, the defense was "The Zoloft Made Him Do It." Rather than rant about litigators taking cases to make names for themselves, or about taking a high profile criminal case with a sympathetic defendant for free so as to pave the way for a soon-to-follow civil class action case, let's just look at the facts here, which will illustrate precisely why the wheels of justice grind eternally slow....

By the age of 12, poor Chris's mother has abandoned him once, come back into his life unexpectedly for a period of months, and then abandons him a second time. Meanwhile, his father is in the process of finishing up his third divorce. When Chris is living with him, he uses the belt, the paddle, and various psychological techniques to discipline him. Chris, who had lived with his paternal grandparents in South Carolina for a time several years before, is so depressed at the prospect of continuing to live with his father, that he threatens suicide. This results in a prescription for an anti-depressant (Paxil) and a move back to South Carolina, where his prescription is changed to Zoloft.

Now, I'm gonna go out on a limb here, and take a wild guess that, even before the Paxil and the Zoloft, Chris might have had a couple of demons he was battling -- fear of abandonement, perhaps some sort of attachment deficit disorder, some sort of fear of intimacy, an absolute aversion to discipline and authority. (Don't mind me; I'm just spit ballin' here.)

Anyway, at some point after his return to his paternal grandparents, he has the dispute and blows them away. The defense comes in and says, "Poor kid. All that Zoloft caused him to think murderous thoughts." Nevermind that, at worst, Zoloft has caused suicidal thoughts in a very rare minority of people (and suicide is just a wee bit different from murder), and nevermind that there are no other documented cases of Zoloft driving someone to murder. Let's just throw it up there and see what happens.

If that was all there was, maybe you can make the argument work enough to hook one juror (that's all you need for an acquittal) into believing that maybe the kid wasn't responsible for his actions, and maybe the drugs put him over the edge. But that's not all the evidence there was. Check this out.

After he blew his grandparents away, he then set the house on fire. Not just a little fire, like throwing a match into a pile of newspapers. No, he used accelerants, and candles, and started the fire in various places in the house. He then stole their SUV and took off, hiding out in the woods. When found, he then told a tale about a 6 foot, 2 inch black man who murdered his grandparents and kidnapped him. When he ultimately confessed (that same day) to the killings, the two detectives who interviewed him described him as clear-headed, lucid, and well-aware of what he'd done. He also said they deserved it.

Now, let's just pause for a moment. Before I tell you what the verdict was, with that kind of evidence, even with a twelve year old defendant, what would you have ruled?


I predicted "Guilty."


The jury agreed with me.


The kid's doing thirty years.


I won't lose any sleep over that.


As a couple of side notes:

His maternal grandmother (notably, NOT his father) took care of him while he was out on bail during trial. Knowing what this kid did to the paternal grandparents, I'm not sure I would have taken that particular leap of faith.

His older sister believes that his three years in juvenile detention, together with the fact that he'd have to live with the knowledge that he'd killed his grandparents, was punishment enough. She has all the makings of a great defense attorney. Had he killed his parents, instead of his grandparents, she would have begged for mercy because the poor child was now an orphan.

Somehow, despite it all, justice prevailed. Even pissed-off twelve-year-olds don't get to kill their grandparents without repercussions of some kind.