6.Defense Closing Argument by Boyd Young

BOYD YOUNG: Thank you, Your Honor. Killing children that you love is insane. What did Tim say? He said this is my fault. I did this. I'm not holding it against Nahtahn, I'm just telling you what happened. That's what he told Deputy Creech. That's the tape that the Defense played for you. We didn't make these laws. We didn't decide what the statutes say. Tim doesn't decide what his defense is. Every psychiatrist that has met with Tim to talk about how he was on August 28th, 2014 has said he was psychotic. They disagree about why, but they all said he was psychotic. Even the Court's expert, Dr. Frierson, says that he felt morally justified in doing what he did, but he had the capacity to know different. That doesn't make any sense to me. To know -- to believe that one thing is right and to know it's wrong. But that's why we have juries. That's why you have to make the decision. Killing children that you love is insane.

A brain disease that can make you think that that's the right thing to do is a nightmare, but it's what Tim has. Yes, Tim told some untruths. He tried to buy time. He tried to hide. And after the unintentional death of Nahtahn, what did Tim say? What were his words? I think they were going to have issues like me. I thought they were going to be like me. I thought they would be better off in heaven than being like me. Does it make sense? No. He's crazy. You can't rationalize crazy. But at the time, he thought it was the right thing to do. Everyone says that Tim loved his kids. Every witness you heard from said that Tim loves his kids. And tragic, horrific, that love killed them. He thought they would be better off. His diseased mind believed that the punishment of Nahtahn was not only legal, but ordained by God. It is what you're supposed to do. He did not appreciate the legal wrongfulness of his conduct in his disciplining of Nahtahn.

His diseased mind believed that Merah, Eli, Gabriel, and Elaine were better off in heaven than living. He did not appreciate the moral wrongfulness of his conduct and that is insane. If you look at the whole story, the whole forest that Mr. Hubbard wants to belittle Mr. Madsen for making that metaphor, but if you look at the whole forest, not just a couple of trees, this is the forest of insanity. Tim had a diseased and damaged brain and spice and Chantix were like pouring gasoline on a fire. The Defense is trying to tell you the whole story. Here's everything that was in the car. Here's all the pictures from the house. Here's stuff that the State didn't collect from the house, but the Defense did. We've done everything that we can to show you the whole story, not just a few pieces, not just a few trees. If you look at his whole life -- Dr. Frierson tells you he wants to believe that he's mentally ill. He needs to believe that he's mentally ill to live with what he's done.

But if you look at his whole life, that doesn't make any sense. He's been brain damaged and crazy long before 2014. Where does it start? Where do you start his story? Where do you first look? His story starts with his genetics and it starts with his family and it starts with his mother. And he told you -- every witness has told you that schizophrenia is a highly inheritable disease. Tim's mother has one of the most untreatable forms of schizophrenia that any of these experts have ever seen. Frierson says that she's on a medication of last resort for the treatment of schizophrenia. Having one parent with schizophrenia makes you ten, fifteen times more likely to develop the disease. And then what did Dr. Dorney tell you? He's got 20 other family members with serious mental illness. What does that do to his odds of developing schizophrenia? It increases it exponentially. The environment that Tim was raised in was one of abuse, neglect, violence.

That environment, we know and it's uncontested, increases the odds of somebody developing schizophrenia, especially a person who is already genetically loaded for the disease. That soil, the seed was watered with neglect and abandonment. We know that that increases his odds in developing schizophrenia. He's already fragile and genetically loaded brain suffered a further injury when he was a passenger of a car and through no fault of his own, the car got in a wreck and he suffered a head injury. You've seen the head injury. You've seen the extent of the damage. It's not just a cracked skull. It's not just a skull fracture. There's still blood in the skull. His hippocampus is damaged. His corpus callosum is damaged. You've seen the images. You have copies of them. Tim didn't choose his genetics. Tim didn't choose his environment. Tim didn't choose to have a traumatic brain injury. But what did Dr. Snyder tell you about his brain injury?

He told you that the brain in these images is positively correlated to schizophrenia. He says that's not diagnostic of, that doesn't mean that he has it. Positive correlation is like looking at two parents and saying well, you two are tall, I bet you'll have tall kids. That's a positive correlation. The next step from positive correlation to diagnostic of is something that we're not to yet, but Dr. Bigler is working on it. Dr. Bigler also told you what Tim's damaged brain anatomy says about his future. Yes, he said it was a broken brain. He also told you that every behavior has the anatomy. Every emotion, every action originates in our brain. He told you about when people have brain injuries, just like Dr. Agharkar said, how do people see people with brain injuries, they're jerks. They think they're jerks. That's a brain injury. It's not a personality. They want you to believe that he's just mean, Tim's just mean. Just ignore the uncontested fact of a brain injury, that doesn't matter.

Tim didn't choose to have a brain injury. It's no surprise that growing up in an environment like that that Tim started experimenting with marijuana. What everybody thought of as innocent teenager experimentation, what nobody knew at the time was that teenage experimentation with marijuana significantly increases the changes of developing schizophrenia. If there's a risk factor for developing schizophrenia, Tim has it. There's not a single risk factor that he doesn't have in space. Tim's brain damage, his wreck, it didn't do anything to him. He was fine. He was doing good in school. He went to Mississippi. He got a job at Intel. His father told you that he changed. He went from a nerd to somebody with an I don't care attitude. He went from a straight A student to somebody who's getting in trouble and having bad grades. That's a significant change. That's an impact from his brain injury. So what does Tim do? He joins the Navy. He's going to be a Navy Seal. He washes out in 44 days.

And they all say well, his hip, his hip was bothering him. Must have been his hip. Must have been depressed about not being a Navy Seal because of his hip. Except for the fact that his hip is not mentioned in any record. There's no record from the Navy saying he's complaining about his hip. There's no form from some commanding officer saying he's not able to make the run, he's not able to jump, he's not able to do the pullups, he's not able to do the situps. That's not in there. What's in there, he's isolated. He's crying. His moods are cycling. He gets diagnosed with a depressive disorder around the age of 19 or 20, which the State's experts agrees is often a precursor to a major mental illness, a depressive disorder diagnosis. They knew about his drug use because they gave him a waiver for it. He told them about it beforehand. When Tim leaves the Navy -- or gets kicked out of the Navy, he starts self-medicating or treating his depression with drugs and alcohol. He gets arrested.

He steals a couple of cars. He gets arrested for powder cocaine. He steals money. He steals a check book from his father. He has drug paraphernalia. And his dad says I'm going to leave you in there. You're going to stay. I'm not bailing you out. And Tim goes to a boot camp, not unlike a military boot camp, a boot camp which Tim completes without ever complaining about his hip. And in that boot camp, he finds a new way to cope with what's been going on with him. He finds the Bible. He finds a new instruction manual. But it's not just any form of religion that he finds, he finds fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible, which is literal and unalterable word of God. It's his instruction manual. It gives him a purpose in life. It tells him who he is. It tells him how to handle every situation. It told him that he was loved. It's where he found his identity. It was a release from his abandonment. It calmed the fire in his mind. And when he got out, he joined Pastor Sutton's church.

And you heard from Pastor Sutton. Tim was the only member of the church that could annoy the whole congregation. He had a prodigious ability to memorize scripture, but couldn't apply it. All he could do was tell everybody else what they were supposed to be doing. That's his disease. Eventually, Tim meets Amber. And Dr. Hames told us Tim bloomed like a rose. They stayed members of the church and Pastor Sutton married them. Eventually, Tim accuses Pastor Sutton's wife of trying to seduce him and Pastor Sutton gives up. He says I can't work with you anymore. I'm tried to trying to get through to you. I'm tired of the two a.m. phone calls. They move on. But he did tell Pastor Sutton one thing. He told Pastor Sutton about the monster inside of him. The monster inside of him trying to get out, which he was able to relieve through speaking in tongues and other church rituals. Pastor Sutton told you that Tim used the Bible to translate a world which he did not understand. That's his damaged and diseased brain trying to make sense of things. Tim and Amber started a family and they found another book, The Godly Seed. This is a book by a guy named Denny Kenaston on how to raise kids. If you follow this guide, your kids will be well-behaved, they will be obedient, they will love you, they will never want to leave you. This is what Brother Denny has to say about raising children. (Whereupon, audio was played for the jury starting at 2:50 and ended at 2:55 p.m.)

BOYD YOUNG: Tim's diseased and damaged brain, what Brother Denny was selling was as poisonous as what he was getting. A rational mind can say well, I understand that, I understand what he means. Tim couldn't. He was divinely inspired and that's what he had to do. Tim and Amber moved to South Carolina and they bought a trailer and they were going to homestead. And Tim was following his instructions and everything was going to be great. But when they got there, everything immediately fell apart. The homestead failed, his marriage failed. He had done what he was supposed to do and he couldn't figure out why it was going wrong. It was going wrong because of his diseased and damaged brain. His symptoms got so impaired that it impaired his ability to work and he sought professional help. He went to Dr. Hames. He knew he couldn't tell her about the voices. He told her about the monster inside. The monster that he was able to soothe with his religion. The monster that Amber couldn't hear either.

That's schizophrenia. When he and Amber split up, he moved his kids to Mississippi to be with his parents for the summer and he lived with a couple of coworkers. And they told you about Tim's disease and about his brain damage. They told you he was weird, that he was strange, that he had strict religious views, that he couldn't pick up on social cues, that he didn't have a filter, that he was irrational. He was a tin-foil-hat type. He was paranoid about Facebook. He didn't have any friends and they didn't want anybody thinking that they were his friend. They let him stay there because they felt sorry for him. He isolated himself. And when he started to act weird, he told them I'm on medication from a vasectomy, so that explains why I'm acting weird. But they also told him that he loved -- told you that he loved his kids, that he was devoted to his kids, that he talked about his kids, he doted on his kids.

And every Friday after work, he got in his car and he drove back to Mississippi to be with his kids and every Sunday night after he put them to bed, he drove back to arrive in time at work on Monday morning. At the end of the summer of 2014 -- at the end of the summer of 2012, Tim moved his kids back into a trailer, South Lake Drive. He wanted them to be in this school district. He wanted them to go to the Lexington County Schools. He got babysitters to help. And you heard from Ruby and Jodie Durney, they said Tim was a fantastic father. His disease was waning and he was able to pull it together. He had what they needed. He was very thoughtful about what they needed. He had the diaper bag packed. They said he was better than most mothers. And while he was upset about the divorce, Amber was pregnant, so he didn't need their services anymore because he and Amber were going to try again. They were going to try and make it work. We know that that didn't work.

And by the end of 2012, Chrystal Ballentine had moved in. She was helping take care of the kids. Her and her daughter had moved in. And we know that Tim had changed. He was a very different person. He was controlling. He was telling her what to buy, telling her what to wear. He was spanking the kids. It's also the time when Elaine, his infant daughter, came to stay with him. Now, Chrystal has changed her story. Chrystal, when she talked to the police, said that Tim was talking to himself like he was answering somebody else. That's what she wrote in her statement. You heard it and you heard Detective Black. Then she meets with the prosecutors and she changes her story. She originally says she heard Tim in a room, she heard two voices coming from the room. He was not on the phone. There was not a TV. She was adamant about it. She meets with the prosecutors, she changes her story. Detective Black said she wrote it as she said it. She's not making it up. That's schizophrenia.

She left the house. She moved out. Tim was too strict. But she came back a couple of times. And what she saw when she came back shows you that Tim's mental illness was getting worse. He was unkempt. He was dirty. He looked like a bum. She had to cut his hair, shave him, make him put on clean clothes. That's schizophrenia. She even told the police that he started acting like he had mental problems, obsessing about the kids, studying everything. His disease was getting worse. Christmas of 2012, Tim took the kids to meet with his dad. He took them to Mississippi. And his dad knew something was off. His dad saw Tim spanking the kids and preaching to them. He saw, as the child learns what God's purposes are for the spanking, he will yield and give into what he is receiving. He will learn to let it do its work in him and get done soon. There must be enough pain to drive the evil out of the heart. His dad tried to pacify him.

His dad tried to walk on eggshells around him, but he couldn't do it. And on Christmas Eve, after a fight about whether or not you can read A Night Before Christmas or the Bible, Tim packs up his family and leaves. And the Solicitor is right, Tim is so stubborn, so rigid in his thinking that he doesn't talk to his dad again for another year and a half. That's brain damage. When you head into the end of the 2014 school year and Merah and Eli and Nahtahn are finishing up school and they've had the type of problems you would normally expect for kids to have while they're parents are going through a contentious divorce, there's been some lying, there's been some stealing. Normal kid problems when you have a contentious divorce, but Tim doesn't see them as normal problems. Tim sees it as I haven't driven the evil out of their heart. That's his mental illness. That's his coping mechanism. This is on him. His fault. Didn't say well -- he did take them to therapy.

He had taken them to therapy before. He blames himself. And he gets more strict with the kids. Nahtahn shows up at school with a bruise on his chin. We don't dispute that. We put that in. Tim's disease is getting worse. DSS comes out, they meet with the children. They meet with Tim at the police department. They follow Tim from the police department to his house where they go into his house and they notice the excessive religious items around his house. They check his house for food. There aren't any bruises on the other kids. They put in place a safety plan, a safety plan that says no corporal punishment. Tim believes that he is told by God that he has to spank them. He's not going to listen to the agency. He's not going to interpret corporal punishment as Biblical direction. Tim said I don't beat my kids, I give them Biblical correction. The school knew and had seen all the signs of mental illness. They knew he was weird. They knew he was strange.

They knew that when Merah had lice, he said well, I'll use kerosene and a heat gun. They knew about his disciplinary problems. They knew that he had told people at the school to lock Eli up for taking a pencil, to make Merah go spend a day with the school resource office for taking a cookie. That's why they called DSS. After they get out of school, that summer, it was the summer with Joy Lorick where they went to Myrtle Beach. You saw the video. They went to Disney. You saw the pictures. They left Disney, as Joy said, because of the coming storm, not so Tim could get some fix. But Joy told you that when she got there, when she arrived, she first saw a dirty, roach-filled house with little to no food in it. That's mental illness. That's schizophrenia. And Tim had started to add to his disease and brain damage with spice. A drug that you've heard time and time against exacerbates the signs of mental illness, the symptoms of mental illness.

DSS doesn't send him to a parenting class, doesn't make him do a counseling session, they don't do anything. They close the case with no services offered. When they come back, he has the kids go to Christina Ehlke's house, the next door neighbor, the one who lived right around the corner. What does she tell you about Tim? She tells you that he's a good father, that he's weird, that he has strange ideas about the Bible, that he was scatter-brained and changed his mind a lot. He never had any visitors at all. These are all signs and symptoms of mental illness. What about when the State asked Christina Ehlke about what Merah had told her about her mom? My mom doesn't want us. Now, the State wants you to -- the State wanted her to say that it was Tim saying mom doesn't want us, but that's not what she said. What she said was Tim said, Tell her what your mom said, and Merah's response was, my mom doesn't want us. What matters is it's what Tim believed.

In his brain damaged and diseased mind, he believed that to be true. He believed that their mother didn't want them. Finally, they went to Atlanta the first week in August to meet with their great-grandparents, Roberta and Larry. You saw the video from that meeting. You heard about Tim and Roberta's concerns about Tim at that meeting. She knew something was wrong. She knew that Tim was not well. She's seen enough mental illness in her life to know it when she sees it. What's the first thing she does? She gets on the phone with Tim's dad and says you've got to call him. Y'all are both hard-headed, I don't care, apologize. You've got to get in touch with him, he's going downhill. Then on August 7th, DSS comes back to the house. They take pictures of all the kids. Everybody has to raise their shirt. Nahtahn raises his shirt, too. I don't know why Christina Ehlke thought he didn't. There's food in the house. DSS takes pictures of the house.

But Tim doesn't know where the complaint comes from. Tim doesn't know that it's Joy Lorick's friend, Mary Tanner, calling and reporting what Joy told her. Tim doesn't know if his children are conspiring against him or somebody else. All he knows is that DSS is coming back. His paranoia is going up. His disease is coming out. What do we know about how he was doing at work during this time? Jim McConnell tells you his work was suffering. He was changing. He was haggard. He had lost a lot of weight. He had started smoking. He was different. And we also know that he was using Chantix. Not just because he had boxes of it at his house, but because of the searches, the phone searches the State was talking about. You see him search for can I use my health savings account money for Nicorette? He's looking for things to help him stop smoking. He has boxes of Chantix at his house.

The State says taking Chantix irregularly shouldn't cause anybody any problems, but if you have a mental illness and you have brain damage, it can. Taking it irregularly, taking it not as prescribed, taking it without the starter pack is dangerous. That's what Dr. Lipton told you. We had the black box warning from Chantix in evidence. All patients being treated with Chantix should be observed for neuropsychiatric symptoms, including changes in behavior, hostility, agitation, depressed mood and suicide-related events, including ideation, behavior and attempted suicide. These symptoms as well as worsening preexisting psychiatric illness and completed suicide have been reported in some cases of attempting to quit smoking while taking Chantix. You also know that in the weeks leading up to August the 28th, he had begun searching through Google talking about the children electrocuting themselves in outlets, talking about people being electrocuted by electricity.

The State says that's just paranoia. It wasn't long enough to build up to a delusion. Nobody said how long it had to go on to be a delusion. When does it finally crystalize into a delusion? When does it become a delusion? When does it become a delusional belief? Is it when you go home, you're already paranoid, you believe that the kids are conspiring against you and you try to plug something in and that socket doesn't work? Is that when it crystalizes into a delusion? Is that when it becomes a firmly held false belief? That's something you have to decide. On August 28th, 2014, Tim went to work. He went home -- he went and picked up his kids. You saw the video. Solicitor Hubbard was absolutely right, you can hear Merah saying, Daddy, are you feeling better? Tim's being a normal parent. There's nothing that seems to be going on. You know from the computer records and from the phone records that he was manic, that he hadn't slept in three days.

Why is Merah asking him, Daddy, are you all right? Because he hadn't been asleep. He hadn't been seeming himself. The voice mail that Amber leaves him after he hangs up on her, I've been worried about you. You haven't been yourself these past three days. The State has done their best to block your view of the whole story. Ask yourself what they blocked, what they obscured, what they tried to hide. I'm asking you to see the forest for the trees. The State wants to tell you that they know what happened. Believe Tim about one part, but not the other. Solicitor Hubbard said I know what happened with that Woody doll. Unless he was there, he doesn't. Nobody knows how long that doll had been broken. Nobody said, nobody testified anything about it other than it was found in the house. That's made up. It's made up by the Solicitor. There's no evidence of it. Believe Tim when he says he strangled the kids, but don't believe him when he says he didn't intend to kill Nahtahn.

Believe him when he says that the kids struggled, but don't believe him when he says that he loves them. Today, for the first time, believe him when he says he got pulled over by law enforcement the night before the 6th, but don't believe the rest. Believe him when he says I'll take you to the children, but don't believe him when he says I hear voices. That's what they're trying to do. That's what they're telling you to do. It's such an intellectually dishonest thing. Even the investigators said why would he tell us -- why would he tell us all this bad stuff? Why would he say so much damaging information and not be telling the truth about the rest? Not be telling the truth about Nahtahn? Tim's cell phone. He knows he's going to get caught. He's put the kids in the car and he's driving around. The State wants to go on and on about his cell phone. Look at his cell phone searches. What is he doing on his cell phone? How about what he's not doing on his cell phone?

He's not buying a plane ticket on his cell phone. He's not depositing a check on his cell phone. He's not searching on how to get away with murder. Did he search for non-extradition countries? Yes. Did he go to any of them? No. How many times did he drive past an airport with a passport and $3500 in his pocket? It's not rational. It doesn't make sense. It doesn't make sense because he's crazy. He could have called work, called the school, called his dad, called his grandmother, called the babysitter, made up an excuse and been out of the country. If he's this genius, if he's such a smart guy and he's so capable and so has everything together, why is he still here? It's five days before anybody even knows he's missing. He doesn't do any of that. And all of these calls they want to talk about, all these calls that he made, every single text or call that he made was in response to somebody reaching out to him. He never initiated anything.

And this excuse about well, he's got to come back to Lexington because Lexington is the only place that you can get spice. This stuff is sold in gas stations. It's not like you go in and say I need the brand with the AB PINACA. You heard a lot of testimony about how they change the chemical formula and add a new chemical and it's back to being legal in that state, even in Alabama, even in Mississippi. All he had to do was Google hey, where is spice legal and go to that state. He didn't do any of that. He was spending time, like Dr. Frierson, told you grieving with his children. On the 6th, after spending almost nine days in the car riding around the southeast eating, sleeping, stopping to change the oil in his car with his children, playing Merah's favorite song Butterfly Kisses, all with the decomposing children in the car, that's insanity. He runs into Linda Owens. What does she tell you? She says he's not high, he's not drunk. He shuffles around the store. He buys some water.

He buys a Starbucks shot. And this evil genius, this master criminal planner, the guy who's already Googled himself and knows that they're looking for him, who's taken the battery out of his cell phone so that nobody can find him, pulls out his ID and pays with a credit card. That's not rational. That's not somebody who knows what they're doing. After he leaves -- he finds a logging road and he pulls off and he puts his kids in garbage bags and he puts them out and he prays with them and he drives off. That's not rational. That's insanity. And everybody wants to talk about he gets stopped and everybody wants to talk about the note. I know you have a different version of the note. It has a lot of writing on it. The State says yep, makes total sense. This isn't disorganized in any way. This is just a list of stuff to take, how to do it. I tell you what, I will say this, I think that Dr. Frierson was right when he thought that MB stood for Myrtle Beach. To me, it makes sense.

Here's Lexington, here we are. Where's Myrtle Beach? It would be northeast. Camping in between, Las Vegas would be over here. It sort of geometrically makes sense -- geographically makes sense. And so does the smiley face because Myrtle Beach would be a place that he would be happy with his kids, a place where his kids were happy. But you have to make your own mind up. Yep, Tim said to Frierson when questioned, Mexican Border. But it wouldn't be the only thing that Tim got wrong, right? Here they are, Tim's glasses that everybody is looking for, Tim's intact, abandoned, not broken glasses that didn't drive him into a rage. They're on the floor of the house. They're left there by the police. After Tim's arrest, the next morning, he gets taken to a hospital to have blood drawn and DNA samples and hair pulled. He meets with medical professionals to do that. Nobody says this guy is high. Nobody says this guy is drunk. Nobody says that this is guy is impaired.

And then that night, he had the interview with his dad and Marty Patterson where he's screaming about the voices in his head, screaming that Cindy put it in there, screaming put a bullet in my head and end it. The State says that's all spice. It's all spice. He's not psychotic. He's not in any way delusion, it's just spice. It's just coming down from drugs, that's all it is. And I'd tell you to watch it and decide for yourself, but they didn't tape it. I guess we'll just have to take their word for it. But you do know that it was unlike anything they had ever seen before. Patterson told you in his own handwriting he believes the children want to harm him. And then you have the next night, he meets with Detective Creech and Agent Mackey. If it's all spice and it's all him coming down from spice and the next day he's so much better, why is he still talking about the voices? Why is he still talking about the delusions?

The delusions, the paranoia, whatever you want to call it, he's still saying that Nahtahn was trying to harm him. He's still saying the children are conspiring against him. If you want to say it hasn't crystalized into a delusion yet, fine, but it's still what he believes. It's still psychosis and it's still a break from reality. And they want you to ignore the questions Detective Creech and Agency Mackey asked where if you listen to the tape, and it's in evidence, and I hope that you do, where Detective Creech says, Should we ask these questions again? And Detective Mackey, who now says the questions are ridiculous, said, Absolutely. And they go through them and they get the same responses they had before. Tim didn't know it was wrong, would have done it with a cop standing elbow to elbow with him. You know that if his answers to those questions were different, they would have been the first thing you heard about during the trial.

But trust Mackey's word on that's not what he said before he turned on the tape, despite the fact that the first two things out of his mouth were wrong. No court order and no custody order violation. What is Tim telling them? What is he finally telling them why? I thought they were going to be like me. I thought they were going to have issues like me. He always maintained, always has maintained to everybody that he's met with and to this day that Nahtahn was an accident. It was unintentional. He did not mean to hurt him. But that he killed Merah, Eli, Gabriel and Elaine to save them from what he believed to be a worse fate. The worse fate of being like him. Him growing up without a mother, him having abandonment issues, him having voices. He believed he was morally justified in trying to save them.

And then the next day, on the 9th, he takes them without a promise of any kind, without any hope of reward, the only promise they had given him is the child's Christian burial, he takes them to the bodies. And how does Eric Johnson tell us he acted out there on the side of the road? Wailing, screaming, crying. That's not how somebody -- how an evil genius on the run acts. It doesn't make any sense. It's irrational. And the Defense played you the tape that Detective Creech made of him and Tim on the ride back. Tim says, This is my fault. I did this. He's not blaming anybody else. How about what Detective Creech says, I think you loved those kids, but you did what you thought you had to do at the time. What are they saying, Detective Creech was just trying to trick him, trying to get him to provide more information after he had confessed, after he had taken them to the bodies, after they had all the evidence. Why would he say that? He said it because it's true.

The same reason he said to Tim, I think you did the right thing. You've got the jail intake records from Smyth County where they changed the forms from intoxicated to psychotic, psychiatric problems. There's two of them. They were changed intentionally. The other reason that you know that Tim -- what Tim said was true was because of what Dr. Ross told you, the pathologist. She told you that the times of death were different because Nahtahn still had contents in his stomach. Nobody had any injuries consistent with abuse. They x-rayed the whole body. If Tim had flown into a rage and beaten Nahtahn, there would be evidence of it and there's not. There's not so much as a split lip. And that's how you also know that Officers Pressley and Boyd are wrong when they talk about this new version that's not in any of the reports where they can't get the timeline straight.

But if Merah had come in and he had killed her at the same time as Nahtahn, they both would have had stomach contents and they didn't. Tim gets taken straight to SCDC where he meets with Dr. Wood. He's taken there for safekeeping to keep him away from other detainees at the Lexington County Detention Center, the people that the State now wants you to use as your moral barometer to determine whether or not you know something is wrong or not. Dr. Wood sees him that day. She takes his drug history. She takes his family history. She learns about his head injury. And she starts him on Geodon that day. He tells her about the voices. He tells her about the psychotic symptoms. And she keeps changing his meds. She keeps adding meds. She gets up to where he's getting 18 pills a day for his time at Kirkland. He's not sick, according to the State, he's just enjoying taking all these meds. His meds continue when he gets transferred to Lee Correctional.

He's taking such high doses that somebody who was not mentally ill couldn't possibly handle it. Dr. Frierson says well, the negative self-talk resolved after they added Prozac, the SSRI that he talked about. You know that that's not true because Dr. Wood in her notes told you that Tim said it feels weird and it feels funny without the voices, but I'd rather have the brain fog. That's before she ever starts him on Prozac. And the voices stayed gone after the Prozac was discontinued in January of 2017. Dr. Wood didn't get a dime. All she does is treat patients. Every day, she sees people who are trying to scam her. As the Solicitor called them, the lowest of the low. She sees more people trying to malinger mental illness than any other expert in this case. She says he's not malingering. His symptoms are genuine, they're consistent with a mental illness.

She's diagnosed him as schizo-affective disorder because she saw mania, she saw pressured speech and she thought that was a bipolar component to his mental illness. She says he doesn't fit neatly into any one box. The same thing that Dr. Agharkar told you about people who have mental illness and a head injury. She doesn't medicate people who she doesn't believe are sick. She also told you that even if, even if his mental illness was caused through some sort of voluntary intoxication or some sort of drug, the changes are permanent. The damage has been done. His brain is broken. Dr. Agharkar -- I know that the State wants to pretend that they can't say his name and call him the $25,000 expert. He has testified in nine percent of the cases in which he consults with people. He says he doesn't always tell them what they want to hear. In Tim's case, he saw genuine mental illness and he told you what schizophrenia is. He told you it's a break from reality. It's a thought disorder.

It's a brain disorder. It's a brain disease. It's common to have disorganized thoughts, disorganized behavior, hallucinations, negative symptoms. And he also told you that deficits define the disease. You don't define a disease by what a person can do, you look at what they can't do. Tim isn't able to control his life. That's what he couldn't do. Yes, he could go to work. Yes, he was good on computers. What he couldn't do is go out to Wendy's without barking at someone. He's a 30-year-old man. Dr. Agharkar also told you about listening to Tim's taped interviews. The taped interviews from before he was medicated. That's pressured speech. That's indicative of mental illness. It's a brain disease called schizophrenia and it's definitely a nightmare. Dr. Frierson, who's the Court's expert, he told you what Tim relayed to him. That Tim believed that Amber didn't want them and he was going to go away, so he thought it was better for them to all be together.

He told you that Tim felt morally justified and he didn't want them to grow up the way he did. He also told you that Tim was remorseful and regrets it. That's why you ask for forgiveness. The State wanted to say well, why ask for forgiveness? Because he regrets it. He's remorseful. That doesn't mean on August 28th, 2014, at that time and in that moment, he didn't think it was morally the right thing to do. And that's what you have to decide. Dr. Frierson thinks that Tim believing that Amber is being prostituted is perfectly rational, not delusional. That people searching are my kids trying to betray me, perfectly rational, not delusional. The belief that my kids might be trying to electrocute me with a socket, not a delusion, maybe a little paranoia brought on by the spice. He also told you that but for the spice, we wouldn't be here and that the spice made him psychotic. Dr. Frierson told you that he diagnoses people with malingering all the time and he didn't do it with Tim. Dr.

Dorney told you about her conclusions about criminal responsibility and she told you about schizophrenia. She talked to you about brain damage. She talked to you about when Amber called and talked to Tim's dad, talked about the changes in Tim when they moved to South Carolina, that he wasn't right. She does say that she did not consider Dr. Kruse's report and she told you why. She said those tests are designed to try and figure out people who are actively faking psychotic symptoms and that Tim said he didn't have it. That's why she didn't rely on the tests. Tim was not psychotic at the time that he took the tests designed to determine whether or not somebody is actively trying to fake psychosis. If you're answering tests trying to determine whether or not you're actively faking psychosis about you used to be, you're going to come out malingering. Based on everything she viewed, it was Dr.

Dorney's conclusion that Tim was not able to appreciate the legal wrongfulness of his actions in disciplining Nahtahn and he was not able to appreciate the moral wrongfulness of his actions in killing Merah, Eli, Gabriel and Abigail. He was insane. Brain images, family history, all the witnesses you've heard from support what Tim says. It's hard for me to imagine having voices inside of my head telling me what to do, sometimes good things, sometimes bad things, sometimes command delusions, sometimes commands that you have no choice but to follow. They're coming from inside his head. I can't even imagine what it's like. And I can't imagine how you would have to come to terms with what your brain made you do, what your diseased and damaged brain made you do. But I do know that every action has an anatomy. When we think about mental illness, we think about it as the loss of the ability to reason. You can't get from point A to point B.

In fact, you see that there's only one inevitable outcome just like Brice Mankowski told you about how Tim viewed things. He would see the inevitable outcome and then get there. He only saw one inevitable outcome for his kids and that was a tortured existence with institutionalization or worse. He thought that the only thing he could do was send them to heaven and that they would be together and that they would be there and that they would one day be together again. Tim's dad knew something was wrong with him. He can tell when he sits here today. He says this Timmy is the nightmare. I saw it coming. I saw it in his mother and I see it in him. He knew something was wrong with him. Killing someone out of murder -- out of hatred is murder. Killing children out of love is insanity.