Episode 12: The Case Against ... #DamienEchols, #WM3 Damien's suicidal rampage in Oregon and hospitalization

Episode 12, The Case Against    From "Blood on Black" by Gary Meece    "Suicidal, threatening family, drug Use, Parental concern re: Satanism"       When Pam Echols and Joe Hutchison picked up Damien from Charter Hospital in Little Rock, Hutchison had not seen his son for years and didn’t recognize him at first. “I was in there and turned around to Pam and ask her, ‘Is this him?’ You know, I was very confused,”  Hutchison later testified. In a Sept. 3, 2000, declaration, Hutchison talked about Damien’s time in Oregon: “I told Pam I thought we should move to Oregon and we packed up the family and took off. Michael was having a really hard time then. He had just broken up with his girlfriend Deanna and cried the entire ride up there. He was just really, really sad. When we got to Oregon, I set Michael up with a job at one of the BP gas stations that I ran. I thought Michael would do a really good job working there and I was hoping that everything was going to work out.” Echols spent several weeks with the family in Aloha, Ore., just outside Portland, before matters came to a head.  As with many accounts from the Echols family, what actually happened remained unclear. Several incidents led up to Echols being readmitted to a mental hospital.   One medical professional subsequently downplayed Echols’ display of symptoms, suggesting he was using alleged mental problems as a means of manipulation.   Indeed, Echols often has seemed able to turn the “crazy” off at will, using his “mental illness” as just another attention-seeking schtick, like dressing up in black, or as an excuse for bad behavior.       Echols was either dangerously mentally ill or doing a very good imitation of a violent maniac in Portland. As Joe Hutchison later testified, “The altercations that was brought up is two different instances made in one. The first instance was this is —- I was afraid —- he had a habit of shutting his bedroom door and had been by himself and him being depressed as he was, and the medicine that he was taking, I was worried. I went into the bedroom. I opened the bedroom door. He did have a knife. It wasn’t an altercation at that time. I asked him one time, ‘Hand me the knife.’ There was never an argument, never a cross word. He handed me the knife.” Hutchison testified Echols had been talking about committing suicide. As for the second incident, Hutchison testified, “I am the one who took him to the hospital. … And the altercation that broke out he did tell me he would eat me alive but it was after I made the first move …. He had —- he didn’t want to be there but he went there because I took him there for them to do observation on him and at that time and the way that I am, sometimes my temper gets the best of me.  If you say just one little word, you know, it would kind of tee me off. But it was my mistake. I’m the one who cause him to tell me that … He stood up in there and he said somebody is going to get slapped. Well, if anybody had to be slapped,  I’d rather it had been me. I stood in front of him and called him names that I shouldn’t have called him. I called him a punk and I’m one —- I can’t —- it’s my fault. He did tell me he would eat me alive but it was after that. I’m the one who caused it.” Hutchison testified that Echols remained in the hospital about two weeks, though records showed he was there just two days. “From there he was homesick for his girlfriend and everything. I had to make arrangements for her to come out there.”  Echols supposedly had been distraught over his breakup with Deanna but had also reconnected with Domini. Given the time frame, it’s not clear how Hutchison would have been able to make arrangements for Domini  “to come out there.” “And he was set on coming back into Arkansas, back to West  Memphis, and at that time Jack was living down there.”   Hutchison testified, “And finally I said, ‘Well, you know if that’s what he wants, then, you know, let him have him.’ And that’s when he come back t