Twenty-four hours before Benjamin Morgan Hawkes, believing he was, alternately, Jesus Christ and Satan, killed his mother and a teen-age boarder in their Columbia home, a Howard County General Hospital physician made a diagnosis of "stable" but suffering from "anxiety" and sent him home with a prescription for anti-anxiety medicine, according to reports made public yesterday.
It was the mental health system's latest and most deadly failure in its 14 years of periodically housing and treating Hawkes as he struggled with mental illness, Public Defender Carol A. Hanson said yesterday.
"Benjamin Hawkes is not responsible. ... For this is a tragic case of missed opportunities," Hanson said in urging Howard Circuit Judge Diane O. Leasure to accept the recommendations of psychiatrists who said Hawkes, who was charged with two counts of first-degree murder, was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia when he killed Mary Jane Hawkes, 59, and Teena Wu, 18.
During a 45-minute hearing that included an account of the violence in the Hawkes family's Wild Filly Court home Feb. 11 and an accounting of Ben Hawkes' contacts with mental health professionals, Leasure found Hawkes not criminally responsible for the attacks and committed him indefinitely to Clifton T. Perkins Hospital Center in Jessup.
As prosecutor Mary Murphy explained how Hawkes marked his mother and Wu for death but spared his teen-age sister Katie, Hawkes, 26, fidgeted and kept his eyes closed. A fourth person in the house that day, Katie Hawkes' friend Rebecca Grastorf, hid in a downstairs bathroom and was later escorted from the house by Howard County police.
Through Murphy's 12 1/2 -page account, a transcript of Ben Hawkes' interview with a police detective and psychiatric and medical reports entered into evidence, Ben Hawkes' descent into the paranoia and delusion that led to the killings came into focus yesterday, as did his and his family's attempts to get help for him in the days, months and years before.
Hospitalized because of suicidal writings at age 12, Hawkes was an artistically gifted youth who had trouble in school, abused alcohol and drugs, had repeated anxiety attacks and received diagnoses of attention deficit disorder, schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder.
The problems grew, and in January last year, Howard County General Hospital physicians had him committed at Springfield Hospital Center. He had suffered from paranoia - believing his food was poisoned and shutting himself in his room - for a month or two, and his parents called police.
