Case will stay in Bay
By David Angier
November 30, 2006
Eight former boot camp employees
almost surely will have their trial in Bay County.
While it is very early in the
discovery process, four of the lawyers who have been retained in the
case said Wednesday they will not ask for a change of venue.
“This is a Bay County case,” said
Jim White, who represents former drill instructor Raymond Hauck.
“We’re going to try it in Bay County.”
Hauck, 48, Henry Dickens, 50,
Charles Enfinger, 33, Patrick Garrett, 30, Charles Helms Jr., 50,
Henry McFadden Jr., 33, Joseph Walsh II, 35, and Kristin Schmidt,
53, were charged Tuesday with aggravated manslaughter of a person
younger than 18. The charge carries a 30-year prison sentence.
The seven men, all former Bay
County Sheriff’s Boot Camp drill instructors, and Schmidt, the camp
nurse, are accused of causing through neglect the death of
14-year-old Martin Lee Anderson in January. Anderson collapsed
during his first day at the boot camp, a medium-security,
military-style juvenile detention facility and died the next day.
Drill instructors allegedly
manhandled Anderson for 20 minutes to try to make him comply with
their orders to finish a run. Schmidt observed the interaction for a
portion of the time.
Tampa State Attorney Mark Ober
filed a charging document Tuesday saying the eight were negligent in
their duties to protect Anderson.
White said the charging document is
overly broad. He said he’ll ask the state to file a bill of
particulars to specify each individual’s actions concerning
Anderson.
Ober said Tuesday he would like to
try all eight at the same time.
Jonathan Dingus, who represents
McFadden, said he does not yet know whether it will be best to go to
trial together or separately.
“We have 23,000 pages of documents
to look at before we settle on a trial strategy,” he said. As far as
having the trial elsewhere, “there’s probably not a person in the
state that hasn’t heard something about this or formed some sort of
opinion about it one way or the other.”
Dingus said it is likely this will
be a very expensive case to defend. He said several experts probably
will be consulted for medical and police use-offorce issues.
Two of the eight defendants,
Enfinger and Garrett, told Circuit Judge Glenn Hess on Tuesday they
plan to apply for a public defender. The other six are working to
retain the private lawyers that have provided counseling to them
during the 10 months since Anderson’s death.
Dingus said he counseled McFadden
for free prior to the filing of charges. Most of the lawyers
questioned Tuesday said they have not been paid by the state or a
law enforcement union to represent the drill instructors. Instead,
the men and their families are footing the bill, the lawyers said.
Deputy Public Defender Walter Smith
said if both Enfinger and Garrett are assigned to his office, he’ll
defend one and ask for a conflict lawyer to represent the other.
Smith handles most of the murder defenses for the office and said he
probably will have to take the case himself because of how
time-consuming it could be.
Cause of death
Ober’s affidavit of probable cause
that was filed with the arrest warrant is not any more specific
about the allegations than the charging document. But the affidavit
does go into the disputed cause of Anderson’s death.
Panama City Medical Examiner
Charles Siebert Jr. determined that Anderson died of natural causes,
from a previously undiagnosed blood disorder sickle cell trait, that
was aggravated when drill instructors pushed him past his physical
limit.
Tampa Medical Examiner Vernard
Adams, who performed a second autopsy on Anderson’s body, ruled the
death a homicide and said drill instructors suffocated Anderson by
forcing him to inhale ammonia and obstructing his nose and mouth.
“The autopsies and medical evidence
have been reviewed by other medical experts who have found that the
victim’s death was caused by oxygen deprivation,” Ober wrote in the
affidavit.
Both autopsies say, in effect, that
Anderson died from oxygen deprivation, Siebert said Wednesday. His
autopsy report states that deprivation was on a cellular level when
Anderson’s red blood cells deformed, or sickled, under stress and
were unable to provide oxygen to his organs and muscles.
Anderson’s condition continued to
worsen for 14 hours after his collapse as his oxygen-starved organs
put more pressure on his system and began to break down, Siebert
wrote. Eventually, organ failure caused massive internal bleeding
and death, he said.
Siebert said he’s never heard of
that scenario coming about after someone suffocated. He said Adams’
conclusion that Anderson experienced spasms in his throat that cut
off his airflow were not supported by physical findings. Those
spasms, he said, would have been resolved once paramedics opened his
airways with a tube — which they did early in Anderson’s treatment.
Since Siebert’s controversial
autopsy findings, there has been at least one other death in the
nation that has been blamed on complications from sickle cell trait.
Siebert said that person experienced the same cascading physical
deterioration as Anderson.
Siebert said if the drill
instructors are charged with being negligent for not recognizing
Anderson’s condition for what it was, what does that say for the
doctors who treated Anderson for the next 14 hours and were unable
to diagnose and treat him?
“I think that’s the scary thing in
this case,” Siebert said. “That’s the slippery slope, if you will.”
Waylon Graham, who represents
Helms, said the blame rests with the nurse.
“Had the nurse done her job better
and given sound advice to these officers, we wouldn’t even be here
talking about this,” Graham said. “She was asked to observe this
young man, to see if he was faking his problem or whether or not he
was in medical distress, and she just stood by and watched.”
Graham made similar comments in a
television interview Tuesday night, angering Schmidt’s lawyer, Jim
Appleman.
Appleman said Tuesday night that
Schmidt was under the supervision of these officers during the
incident and it was unfair to throw the blame at her.
Schmidt made her first court
appearance Wednesday and was assigned a $25,000 bond, the same
amount as the seven guards. She bonded out later in the day. The
guards posted bond Tuesday. All will be arraigned Jan. 18.
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