Family composition / Early social history

CASE STUDY #1

Background

Defendant was convicted of double homicide in 2011. One of the victims was a 15-year-old boy, a witness whom the prosecutor said the Defendant shot so that he wouldn’t be alive to “snitch.” The other victim was a 25-year-old male, who allegedly sold drugs on Defendant’s turf.

Family composition / Early social history

Defendant’s mother, Tammy Martin, was born in 1963 to Mary and Ronald Boyse. They had four children together: three boys and one girl (Tammy). Ronald and Mary were Irish Catholic and worked for the Navy. Mary was a nurse; Ronald was a production manager. According to Tammy, Ronald was a “functional alcoholic.”

Mary and Ronald divorced when Tammy was eleven. They were living in Southampton, New York at the time. Mary soon remarried a man by the name of Walter. Tammy reported that Walter began molesting her when she was twelve. Mary did not believe Tammy and ignored her pleas for help. “He destroyed my life,” Tammy said.

Tammy dropped out of high school in the twelfth grade and started dating a local man from the town, Robert, who was twenty-five and played in a rock n’ roll band. Tammy said her mother pressured her to get married to get her out of the house. She married Robert at age eighteen and moved with him to Philadelphia, where they rented a small apartment. Six months later she was pregnant.

Shortly after they were married, she learned that her husband was a cocaine addict. He later turned to crack. “I was basically alone for the first two years of our marriage,” Tammy said. “He was out getting high.”

Robert was also violent. “He beat me all the time,” Tammy said. “I didn’t know what to do. I was brought up to be a good Catholic, forgive and forget. I couldn’t tell anyone for a long time. I was too embarrassed.” Tammy reported that Robert punched her, choked her, slapped her and threw her down a flight of stairs. She said he beat her when she was pregnant with Defendant, Jr.

Defendant was born in 1982 at Southampton Hospital in New York. Tammy had moved back in with her mother temporarily during the final weeks of her pregnancy. Tammy and Robert had two other children: Michael, born approximately eighteen months after the Defendant, and Tara, born the following year. Tammy denied any birth complications or drug and alcohol use while pregnant. However, she admitted to using amphetamines and “trying crack” after her third child, Tara, was born.

A counselor from CORA Services, Inc. suspected that Tammy may have used substances while she was pregnant with Defendant. In a SAP Assessment conducted in 1997 when Defendant was 14, a counselor stated in her report:

It is also this assessor’s recommendation that Defendant be evaluated by the school psychologist to determine Defendant’s need for special education services. Defendant’s brother has a diagnosed learning disability. His sister has been diagnosed with ADHD. Defendant’s parents may have abused substances at a time when Defendant was conceived and/or in utero. For these reasons and this assessor’s observations of Defendant’s tendency toward repetitive behaviors, and drifting off during this interview, an evaluation seems warranted.

Tammy was barely out of her teens when she had three babies in quick succession with little emotional, financial and physical means to care for them. Her husband violently abused her and used crack-cocaine, which she later began using herself. Asked to describe the first five years of Defendant’s life, she stated:

It was hard. We were bouncing back and forth between Philadelphia and Long Island. His father was smoking crack and stealing from us. We lived through times with no gas, no electricity, no hot water. At times there wasn’t enough food.

Defendant remembers a vermin-infested apartment without furniture and sometimes no heat. He and his brother slept on a mattress on the floor. He remembers roaches everywhere: on the floors, on the walls, in boxes of cereal.

Other signs of child maltreatment and neglect are evidenced by Defendant’s siblings, Michael and Tara, both of whom have neurological impairment. Neurological impairment is a well-documented risk factor for criminal behavior. Tara was diagnosed with lead poisoning at age one, which resulted in developmental and mental disabilities. Tara also has a criminal record. Defendant’s brother Michael has borderline intelligence and a history of juvenile institutionalization for “out of control” behavior. Notably, four of Tammy’s five children have records of juvenile delinquency.

It was around this time that Tammy met Timmy Martin, an ex-con who would become Defendant’s stepfather. When his father discovered that Tammy was seeing another man, he beat her in front of their terrified children. Defendant remembers his mother falling to the floor and his father “taking anything we had of value before leaving.”

To summarize, during the important formative years of his childhood, Defendant was exposed to the following risk factors for criminal offending:

Teenage mother

Parental drug use